Green Acres: Chatham Courier Columns

Lost in Transit

2012-02-02T09:00:00.001-05:00

After a restorative solo visit to Miami, I was scandalized to find my knickers missing from my luggage. Not exactly my undies, but my bikini bottoms nonetheless. And not only missing, but stolen.

I didn't leave them at my dear friend's house nor did I find them sometime later crumpled in the side pocket of my carry-on. My very last act in sunny FLA had been a few laps of the kidney-shaped pool soaking up the last drops of golden sunshine (his jammy, impossibly glamorous South Beach condominium, a topic for the future). I had only time to change, wring out my bikini and stash it inside a large sunhat neatly compressed as the top layer in my suitcase before he dragged me kicking and screaming back to the airport and the chilly real world.

By the time I arrived home in New York, my luggage had been rifled through with the expertise of a trained TSA agent, an art I believe requires hours of specialized training, so they can poke and prod neatly folded clothes with a technique akin to salad tossing. It ensures maximum disturbance of any master plan to limit creases and spills. Perversely, like a serial killer, they will leave you a complimentary calling card letting know you’ve just been had by the TSA. In the confines of my perfectly innocent case, the hairdryer and oversized bottle of conditioner were left alone, but the striped bikini bottoms vanished.

Luggage handlers have been getting a pretty bad rap recently. Justifiably so, it seems. An entire racket was operating within the belly of American Airlines, with a posse of enterprising baggage handlers only pilfering Rolexes, cameras, and designer clothes as a side habit to their cocaine import business cleverly concealed in the walls of the plane fuselage. When Homeland Security scheduled luggage searches, the clever baggage pit bosses would simply leave the contraband in the walls and send the plane on its way until the next inspection-free landing. Any YouTube search turns up reams of CCTV airport footage from Luton to Joahnnesburg with baggage handlers rampantly plundering carousel-bound bags.

It's true, the Missoni label may have caught someone’s eye and been mistaken for something fancy, but that would overlook the magical week when a Missoni ready-to-wear line for Target was ever so briefly in stock. Anyone with sticky fingers only had to read the small print on the label. Even so, it doesn't explain theft of the bottoms, leaving the rather cute flower-embellished top behind.

I still rely on the post-9/11 directive that forbade travelers to lock checked luggage. My parents, on the other hand, arrived stateside with nifty TSA-approved locks that can only be opened by agents armed with a universal key. Unfortunately, the locks they traveled with were not the same locks placed back on their bags on either the outbound or return legs. How difficult can it be to procure a spare universal key when you are an airport employee? Or perhaps there’s a lucrative trade in luggage locks.

Flying is so devoid of any niceties these days we’re conditioned to practically stripping at security screenings and staring at the ceiling during pat downs with the sort of ho-hum ambivalence normally reserved for annual health check-ups. We could probably pass ourselves off as skilled extras in a remake of The Wall.

Dogged fastidiousness among security personnel seems greatest in small hubs, Albany (nearly-) International among them. In the safe hands of Albany's TSA I have been required to break the seal, taste, and submit for fume testing, three unopened bottles of Pediasure while traveling with a toddler. Liquid medicine has gone through without a hitch, but I've nearly come to fisticuffs when the freezer pack keeping it cold was about to be confiscated. Nail clippers, razors, and lipgloss have all met their maker, though a friend once made it through with a full-size hammer. My laptop has been swabbed for traces of explosives too many times to mention. And breaking all laws of probability, I’m invariably on the extra-screening list. If only my luck was as good at the craps table.

On this trip I caused great excitement by blowing up the body scanner. Albany, rather surprisingly, has one of the high-tech full-body scanners, something like a 360 degree changing room with mirrors designed to give you body dysmorphic disorder. Despite the 6am hour, a flight without car seats, snack bags and pooping children drastically increased my chances for a frequent flier upgrade so on went the heels and a sequin-speckled top. Unfortunately, the sequins dazzle and confuse these body scanners – in my mind it’s like an x-ray machine encountering a disco ball – so alarms sound and the next thing you’re having the most thorough pat down of your adult life.

I’d like to thank the TSA’s finest for keeping us safe (except when my friends travel with hammers) but if we’re going to get meticulous treatment when it comes to security operations, please take better care of my swimwear or I’m really going to get my knickers in a twist.

Leap of Faith

2012-01-26T09:00:00.003-05:00

I shocked my husband with the suggestion that we look into the Catholic school at the top of our road. Having married a Welsh-Irish-Catholic American who attended a parochial Catholic school as a child, it wasn’t surprising that he’d consider it for his own progeny, but from the mouth of his dyed-in-the-wool atheist wife, it must have sounded like conversion.

Sending your children off to school, even at the tender age of Pre-K and kindergarten, can inspire all sorts of personal quandries about setting them off on the right track, nurturing their fledgling independent selves, and providing fertile ground for learning. By fertile, I don’t mean teachers who throw chalk at you – or sometimes the blackboard eraser - for not paying attention, a tactic favoured by the math teacher at my first primary school. (Could any child’s mind be faulted for straying from fractions to marvel at how his trousers stayed up, belted as they were under a hugely distended stomach like string slicing into a ball of dough?) Nor do I mean the cruel English nuns who used to rap my husband’s fingers with a ruler, although the fact that he ended up marrying an Englishwoman, (note, not a nun), is not lost on me.

Having gone the route of a very liberal, creative-learning type of school for Pre-K, it turns out our Catholic and Church of England backgrounds have influenced us more than we knew. The current school’s teaching philosophy and marvelously caring teachers cannot be bettered, but the whole first-name basis between students and teachers, and casual attitude to middle-schoolers snacking, listening to iPods and interrupting teachers leaves me gob-smacked.

It seems reasonable we’d gravitate toward a school that is culturally familiar, though that’s a tall order for me in the states. My primary school had us sporting straw hats in the summer, blue berets in the winter (eat your heart out, Monica Lewinsky), and courtseying to teachers at the end of each day. We also had marvelously archaic responsibilities such as flag duty (running the flag up and down the flagpole) and bell duty (chiming a large brass hand-bell in the hallways to announce the end of class). And let’s not forget the host of throwbacks to yesteryear with highly subjective awards for deportment, character, and musical accomplishment. Perhaps they were preparing us for courtship war, sending out a battalion of Little Women.

I’ll admit this recent school envy started when my UK friends began posting Facebook pictures of little Charlie and Jemma in brand-spanking new kindergarten school uniforms. Knobbly knees sticking out from shorts and pinafore dresses; large satchels hanging off tiny woollen blazers; eyes peeking out from under crested school hats. The longing only grew when video clips and pictures arrived in my December inbox with an adorable Ben and Elsie dressed as a wise king and a glittery star in their school nativity play. Our school has a moratorium on any holiday celebrations at all. You read that right. No Easter or Easter bunny, no secular Hallowe’en, no Channukkah, and definitely no Christmas. Not even a school tree or hand-made ornament. Considering our own Christmas tree still features a small glittery egg-box creature made in kindergarten by my husband, aged four, you catch my drift.

Frankly, I’d have been perfectly content with a little secular winter play along the lines of Rudolph and the Snowman, but no such luck. When the librarian fretted aloud over a prominent display of December holiday and winter solstice books at the Scholastic book fair, I rolled my eyes. Why should we be worried, I asked? There are parents, she ventured, who prefer no mention – whatsoever – of any holiday celebration. I wondered how they coped in the supermarket or mall.

In America, there are three school picks: public-run, independent private, and private faith-based, most commonly Catholic. The public schools are uniform-free, except for the students’ self-imposed fashion rules. Private independent schools are typically anti-establishment and go without; while Catholic schools, bless their cotton socks, go whole hog for uniforms, in red and white, plaid, and navy blue. Looking at the array is like manna from heaven. All I can think is how easy school mornings would be and how many home clothes could be saved from the ravages of paint time.

No doubt the tyranny of chalk and nuns and the welcoming environment of a secular democracy both work, but neither approach seems quite right, and the quest to find the right school turns out to be as much about satisfying us, as our children. I sat my husband down to brainstorm. Besides nurturing teachers and academic records, suddenly respect, good manners, and a school uniform topped my ideal school list. The idea that I, of all people, might be in the market for a little old school structure and civility was an epiphany.

Still unsure about enrolling in the Catholic school, I met with the head. She offered her take on their school as imparting a moral framework and instilling students with Christian values: a system of cooperation, understanding, and enrichment. Now this was my mind of mantra. After all, drilled down, most religions provide a handbook to stave off anarchy.

In turns out, I’m not alone. In the UK, although active worship has been in precipitous decline over the last 50 years, religious schools have been growing in popularity, in part for their willingness to teach core values and respect.

The head stressed their students include Jewish, Muslim, and the non-practicing (though I half expected her to call the latter ‘infidels’). They’ve won the New York State science fair with a team that was mostly girls. They teach Spanish from kindergarten up. And they have a pretty spiffy uniform. I’m pretty much hooked. It’s just going to take a leap of faith.

The Tipping Point

2012-01-19T09:00:00.000-05:00

Guess what? I have a great idea! Forget cow tipping, let’s work on our resumes, write cover letters, apply for jobs, schedule interviews and then – wait for it, here’s the fun part – not show up! Doesn’t that sound like fun? Just imagine the look on the face of the employer, or perhaps that work-from-home mum looking for some hands-on help. Better yet, perhaps they’ll have worked hard to juggle around schedules so we can really waste some time.

The applicant described herself as, “reliable, dependable, and caring.” She studied art during a year abroad in Italy, had been a beloved nanny for umpteen families, and was hoping to teach art to at-risk youth. “Trust me,” her profile read, “I treat every child as if it were my own.” Trust me, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Despite the number of emails we’d exchanged confirming times and directions, perhaps I should not have been surprised when she left me holding the baby instead of showing up for the interview.

A few weeks back, my husband’s firm placed an ad for an office manager. He whittled the applicants down to half a dozen good ones and scheduled interviews around his crazed schedule. And then three of them failed to show up. So what’s the story? In a climate where every newspaper and media outlet is reporting endlessly on record unemployment rates and the every sneeze and move of Occupy Any-City, it’s hard to imagine applicants wasting their time ofor kicks and giggles. You can’t help but wonder what’s going through people’s minds.

I’d exchanged several emails with my potential art-student-cum-babysitter, so when she failed to appear I thought I’d better check in to see if the no-show was perhaps due to getting lost, a misunderstanding, or a plain old rescinding of interest. We’d been fortunate with a bumper crop responding to our Care.com ad, but I confess this applicant had seemed particularly promising, a good fit. The daft part here is that online hiring sites equip you with an array of marvelous tools, among them the ability to see when people have logged in to view their messages. Our candidate may have thought better of showing up, but I was able to see that she had checked my message less than an hour after I’d sent it. So much for hiding; her guilt was transparent.

To be fair, the dismal slide in basic hiring courtesy goes two ways. In recent years, job applications have become a tough, impersonal business. Companies rely increasingly on the kind of online submissions that strip every last shred of personality from your resume and leave you neatly boxed within a few dates and lines about your academic and career experience. They might as well provide you with a virtual pink ribbon with which to wrap yourself up. You might be given a small chance to shine with a box that mimics a short cover letter but, even then, the character limit will probably keep things to a superficial please-and-thank you sound bite.

However impersonal the 21st century job application process may be, my beef lies with the companies that fail to respond to potential recruits. What could it possibly take out of anyone’s day to send a boilerplate “thank you but no” rejection letter? Several years back, I was incredulous to receive a phone call inviting me to come in for an interview a full three months after I had submitted the application. Not that they had ever actually acknowledged receiving it.

And so it seems the worm has turned. Perhaps applicants are trying their hand as a some sort of virtual jail bait, hedging their bets to come off as the peach perfect applicant right up until potential employers take a shine to them. Whatever the ploy, let me tell you firsthand it’s a royal pain in the proverbial derriere.

I’m hoping my remaining interviewees show up and present their A-game. With our sitters graduating and applying for jobs in new careers, I feel my own share of embarrassment as their applications go unanswered and follow-up calls unreturned. It surely doesn’t take much to make courtesy part of the plan. Unless, that is, you find it as entertaining as cow tipping.

Olympic Agony

2012-01-12T09:00:00.001-05:00

Friday morning, nine o’clock. I was pouring my post-school run coffee when I received a text from my father: ‘The Olympic ticket website has opened!’ I nearly choked, abandoned the myriad urgent things on my to do list (bills, work and returned phone calls could wait) and plunked myself squarely in front of the laptop. The task would need undivided attention. The kind that involves breaking a cardinal rule (one involving a small child and a television set) so I could bash away feverishly at the keyboard like a maestro possessed.

The Olympics London 2012 has been plagued with controversy and frustration ever since the ill-conceived national ticket lottery made winners of a few, and losers of more than two thirds of applicants. The newspapers have been all over it and my fellow countrymen range, somewhat narrowly, from utterly frustrated to simply unimpressed. It’s been twenty-one months since I signed up for the critical updates from the official Olympic website. I watched it crash and fumble during the lottery submission period. I waited on tenterhooks as deadlines passed or were rescheduled. And just when the ticket resale period was about to open in December, Locog, the London Olympic Committee, psyched us out by saying it wouldn’t open ticket resales until April 2012. April, with the games starting in July? Surely someone was havin’ a larf.

I pounced on tickets and scoured the website for 90 minutes straight, madly texting my husband at work in the OR to get his thumbs up for picks in men’s diving, beach volleyball, athletics and gymnastics. It was unbelievable – tickets were available for almost every event, some in higher price brackets than I’d originally chosen, others available in almost every price tier. There were even tickets for the opening and closing ceremonies. Everything looked peachy until checkout. No tickets were protected in your Ticketmaster cart until you actually clicked through to checkout and with every attempt to buy my screen only flashed up, “No tickets matching your requested items can be found.”

I was flipping out. Back I went to the available dates and tickets and picked one event, two tickets and went to Checkout. Not available. Over and over again. Every event that showed available tickets would come up as none available before the entire site seemingly crashed. The little Olympic icon – (I can’t decide if it more closely resembles a shattered Union flag or the glow-in-the-dark numberless Quartz watch face I owned when I was about twelve) -- that spins while it processes your request, wound around endlessly until it had the decency to time out with an unhelpful message. To paraphrase, the ticket resale site had been suspended until Ticketmaster could sort out the mess.

So where exactly did the problem lie? People attempting to offload tickets found they were taken from their accounts but did not appear online until several hours later. Tickets that were actually showing up continued to be listed as available sometimes up to three hours after they had been sold. Without any protection over the tickets in a buyer’s cart – something that’s typically managed at theatre ticket sites with a two or three minute hold while you decide whether to finalize your purchase – others were able to purchase the very tickets that were ostensibly safely stashed in your cart. The issues go on and on. The site was overwhelmed by the massive crush of people that hit the site the second doors metaphorically opened at 9am on Friday morning, Greenwich Mean Time. Given all the hype and hoopla over the lottery system, and the millions of Brits hoping to score tickets, it doesn’t seem possible Ticketmaster could have envisioned anything other than a web-based version of the Running of the Bulls. Did they really think people would be casually taking a look-see intermittently until the site closes on February 3rd or patiently waiting to get their hot little mitts on, well, just about anything they could?

As of Tuesday this week, the official site is still down and the media is blowing up with a mixture of howling guffaws and vicious lambasts. If the little matter of ticket issuance has been this much of a fiasco, can we expect the London transport plans to go any more smoothly? Meanwhile, the wait is brewing the perfect Molotov cocktail with equal parts of anticipation, trepidation and desperation. Whatever Ticketmaster is doing to fix the mess, they’d better be prepared for the onslaught -- or they’ll be the ones for the high jump.

The Winter That Wasn't

2012-01-04T09:00:00.000-05:00

It’s a new year in New York and still no snow. This particular weather upset is one of the most talked about topics I’ve ever experienced in the US. From the Post Office to the local news stations there seems to be consternation and wonder in equal parts, some even musing whether winter might slip by (we should be so lucky) with us transitioning smoothly from chilly autumn to early spring. There’s a sort of group befuddlement in the air as though the year’s requisite snow has somehow gone missing. I half expect the weathermen to post ‘Missing’ signs on their studio maps, so remarkable is their surprise over the no-show snow.

I suspect it may be my fault. It was top of my wish list to Santa when I wrote, “Dear Santa, All I want for Christmas is an easy winter. I don’t have it in me to shovel every morning at 6am and I’m too young to be a Florida snowbird since my children are only in pre-school.” Perhaps our elf put in a good word, or Santa picked up my telepathic messages at the Washington Park boathouse grotto. Either that or he thought I was giving him the eye.

To be fair, I had already jinxed the possibility of snow. First, I implored my parents to prepare for a promised (and clearly over-hyped) white Christmas in the US. My efforts resulted in them packing more than enough warm sweaters, undies, and heavy socks to almost warrant a third suitcase. Second, in August I signed my daughter up for ski lessons in January. Third, I made my annual shopping trip to LL Bean and bought cross-country skis for our children. Since then, not a snowflake.

I should have learned my lesson last year when I harboured romantic visions of the family zipping around on a body of frozen water, bundled up in hats and scarves, sipping creamy hot chocolate from a flask. I may have been channeling Rockwell. As a result, everyone received ice skates and hot chocolate for Christmas – even my not so delighted husband, especially when I supplied new hats and scarves to keep us warm. Unfortunately, my ice skates didn’t fit and had to be sent back. Then our backyard pond didn’t quite freeze, or at least not to the degree where I’d trust my family on it en masse. And my hopes of night time skating at the Empire State Plaza - flanked majestically on all sides by the state museum, the Senate, and the Egg - were dashed when budget cuts meant it didn’t even open. I may have a more successful career as a romantic war poet than an outdoor sports director.

This year, the ice skates have been waiting hopefully for the outdoor ice rink at Schodack Landing State Park to freeze. Since Christmas, the skis have been leaning against the sliding glass door staring morosely at the backyard slope. While ski lessons are supposed to start this weekend our hostas are busy pushing up new green shoots, and the ski schools are frantically manufacturing snow.

Here’s the strange part. The snow blower remains in the garage, the morning school commute’s a snap, and walks outside are still pleasant instead of a face freezing tundra. But are we happy? No, we’re not. It seems we New Yorkers feel robbed of our winter wonderland and we’re practically salivating at the prospect of fresh powder snow. My hankerings have been so strong I even looked into cut-price mountain passes and ventured into Eastern Mountain Sports to look at new ski goggles.

After a dusting teased us earlier this week, today’s promising snow reports have my entire household clasping their hands in the hope of a snow day the first week back to school. Meanwhile, I’m conflicted by my secret hope to get out in the white stuff without coming across as ungrateful to Santa.

The Ghost of Christmas Revenge

2011-12-28T09:00:00.001-05:00

Enough of all that Christmas spirit and being charitable. Let’s talk about the girl – now identified as Annie Wagner – sitting in the bleachers at the Bears vs. Packers Christmas Day football game. My husband was on the sofa in a post-turkey torpor as I walked in to hand him a Christmas beer. The camera just happened to zoom in on a girl in the crowd grinning ear to ear and madly waving a sign that read: “My cheating EX-boyfriend is watching from his couch instead!” Woe betide a woman scorned at Christmas-time, but especially a Green Bay Packers fan with playoff tickets. Apparently her boyfriend learned the hard way and hadn’t managed to postpone his dalliances until after the drafts. Now here she was at the Christmas Day game, a beaming little slip of a thing, all fired up with the pleasure of Christmas revenge and the national outing of a two-timing cad. I’m sure we’ve all harboured such a wicked thought, so let me just say: ‘Merry Christmas, Annie Wagner! You go girl!’

My parents joined us from the UK for the holidays and after discussing Annie Wagner’s tale of recompense at the dinner table, my mother revealed a friend of hers once chopped all the sleeves off her gambling husband’s expensive suits in a furious attempt to break him of his casino habit. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this stroke of genius applied in a movie. Perhaps it’s a common knee-jerk reaction. Another of her friends tired of her husband spending excessively on (and no doubt drinking) expensive wine. When her patience finally ran out she drove around the neighbourhood leaving bottles of wine next to the milk delivery on every doorstep. Seems a lot more charitable than pouring it down the drain. And what colourful friends to keep you company. The third tale was of a woman who caught her philandering husband in flagrante in the their marital home. After he agreed to leave for the night, she rounded up all his televisions, expensive electronics and gadgets and left them on the front lawn with a helpful sign saying, “Free”. Surely nothing says Christmas like giving away all your earthly possessions, voluntarily or not. He must still be reaping the karmic rewards to this day.

With Christmas now behind us, we have less than a week to ready ourselves for the New Year and host of life-improving resolutions we’re supposed to make publicly and privately. It’s like a perverse two-finger salute to the gluttony of Christmas: the heedless over-eating, the demolition of boxed chocolates one soft center at a time, and all those glasses of pinot noir and prosecco. Perhaps New Year’s resolutions are not so much about purifying and bettering ourselves for an ever fitter, healthier and over-productive year ahead, but a sort of Victorian horrified flashback to a week of over-indulgent sins of the palate.

For me, my most successful resolution ever was a commitment several years ago to Wear More Hats. And I have. Frankly, anything that adds to your life and happiness rather than eliminating and mandating, is going to be a more efficient arbiter of change in my book. So what if I have a pathetic weakness for my secret stash of Cadbury’s chocolate buttons? There are beneficiaries to the mood-restoring power of half-a-dozen little buttons stuffed in my mouth during the daily 4 o’clock meltdown. If two pre-schoolers and a husband can be saved daily by my personal failing (and simultaneously protect me from booze, Valium and therapy), then it’s a crutch I’m willing to hang on to, size 2 pants be damned.

On that note, with 2012 nipping at our heels, may I wish you, and Annie Wagner, the very best for the New Year. May you eat delicious things, drink whatever takes your fancy, be merry and in good company. Rejoice if you’re gleefully leaving a cheating Green Bay Packers fan in your wake. Failing that, dig into a copy of Gretchen Rubin’s amusing book, The Happiness Project, and hunt down your own brand of zen-happy. And if nothing else: Wear More Hats.

Forget the pudding, it's Christmas crumble

2011-12-22T09:00:00.000-05:00

It started when the babysitter told our children she talks to Santa on her way home. I understood the ploy; nothing is more attractive at this time of year than reminding wide-eyed children that Santa and his army of tattle-tale elves are watching, no matter how sinister the implication. (Frankly it’s a wonder more children don’t have nightmares about this. As a child I distinctly remember worrying that every deceased relative was not merely sitting on a cloud playing a harp but also capable of watching me while I changed in my bedroom.) You have to choose wisely since that tangled web of lies we weave can be treacherous. Like all deviations from the truth, once a story line has been set in motion it’s hard to undo. And inquisitive five year olds weren’t born yesterday.

After the sitter left, my daughter began her inquisition. “How come Kay can talk to Santa? Does she call him? Do you believe she really can talk to him? Why don’t you talk to him?” -- and so on, ad infinitum.

With her ears newly attuned to changes in a previously well-oiled story, the five year old started looking for more cracks in our testimony. The next morning I found her sitting under her Elf on the Shelf who was, that particular morning, hanging from the woodstove chimney flue. Her face looked grave. “Mummy, does Small Paul have a tag on his bottom? Is it sewn onto him? What does it say?” Like Adam’s godforsaken apple, this tag threatened to single handedly expose the thundering machine that keeps secular Christmas reinventing itself, even with such madcap new “traditions” as mobile elves. Now she wanted to be picked up to look at the tag. I could hardly refuse. Peering at it together she wanted to know what it said. And suddenly I found myself adding to Original Sin with an elaborate embellishment: this jumble of letters and numbers must be written in Elvish! Perhaps his address - or ours - in case he got lost on his nightly trips to the North Pole? The answer stymied the flow of questions but still had to be shared with the rest of the household, including the sitter, least discrepancies arose.

I wasn’t expecting to be tripped up by the flurry of Christmas shorts hitting the television. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is normally our safe bet, even if Santa seems uncharacteristically grouchy in the first half. Then came the Elf on the Shelf television movie. The collaboration between the Elf book’s creators and the film directors was as symbiotic as a product hawker and an infomercial. For forty minutes, we were treated to thinly veiled explanations of how Santa’s Workshop ships out the boxed sets of books and elves to households around the world. Despite the effort, our children became fixated on the revelation of talking elves that cease to talk once boxed and are revived once named by a family. To even a two and five year old, something didn’t add up. I have now spent the better part of a week trying to change the conversation.

With Christmas Eve approaching, the excitement has been growing with our imminent ride on the Polar Express only adding to the fever pitch. I’m trying to hide the news that another (ostensibly magic) upstate NY Polar Express train recently derailed with children rescued by firefighters and transported back by bus. I didn’t fancy getting into a discussion of why a bunch of flying elves and reindeer didn’t come to the rescue.

In case you think that’s it, there is now genuine concern over Santa’s arrival. Why does he have to come down the chimney? Why doesn’t he come through the door? Does he come upstairs? Can anyone come into our house through the chimney? If so, shouldn’t we leave a fire burning when we turn on the house alarm? So while I prepare myself for the battery of questions that peppers this house from dawn to dusk, I welcome both the arrival and departure of Santa. We have the reindeer food (oatmeal and gold glitter) to sprinkle on the lawn, reindeer moss (which helps them fly), cookies and milk (for American Santa), mince pies and sherry (for British Father Christmas), and carrots for good measure. Letters were sent to the North Pole, the live reindeer camera checked, and Santa’s Christmas video personalized and viewed. So this morning’s revelation came out of nowhere. “Mummy, I don’t think I believe in the Easter bunny anymore.”

One month of Christmas, gift wrapped, please.

2011-12-15T09:00:00.002-05:00

Even if you’re busy rolling your eyes and sighing morosely over the inescapable crush of Christmas commercialism, you have to admire the galvanizing effect of the festive season. Whatever holiday you are celebrating, (and I’ll bet my red-hot credit card you’re celebrating something), it still manages to whip us into a froth to rival any Starbucks’ barista.

This time it’s not only about marketing ploys and product placement. This time we do it to ourselves; and I’m beginning to suspect it’s a sort of hanging chad of childhood excitement where, given enough glitter, twinkly lights, and looped Frank Sinatra hits, we gladly saddle up with the rest of the herd. You wouldn’t think there were eleven other months of the year where we could legally shop for holiday gifts. When summer ends, early autumn merely serves as the elastic in a figurative festive slingshot. We carb-load on Thanksgiving, falling asleep on tryptophan by 7pm, before Black Friday catapults us into the buying frenzy that has only a tiny head start on the twelve days of Christmas. It’s a wonder we don’t skip the partridge part and start at ten lords a’leaping.

It’s not just presents. Once the D-month arrives, we’re suddenly gripped with the need not only to buy festive but also to experience festive. Houses are wired up, trees drip with tiny lights, and we book up our remaining days madly. There are the holiday lights in the park, photo ops with Santa, cookies and gingerbread baking, the ubiquitous pilgrimage to a Nutcracker ballet, and now, (as if watching the movie isn’t enough), scheduling a real live Polar Express train ride. After the steady stream of crafting and cooking that has possessed every week since Hallowe’en, I decided it was fully within my rights to abandon a family trip into the city for the Radio City Christmas show and redefine it as an overnight getaway.

The beauty of train travel into Manhattan is freedom. Freedom to read, snooze, or watch the scenic Hudson River skim by. And freedom to smile indulgently at other people’s children while temporarily unhinged from our own. Having snagged a “quiet” carriage for the ride in, a chatty woman was impaled on daggers thrown by twenty sets of eyes for her heavy cell-phone use. But while the quiet car was busy trying to be quiet, the rest of the train seemed to be jigging around in a fit of excitement, gaggles of children practically mugging outnumbered parent-chaperones for morsels of Doritos and juice.

In town, we tapped into our inner tourist on a wave of city-nostalgia and in twenty-four hours we’d strolled Fifth Ave, pored over window displays, checked out the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, walked in Central Park, dined out and taken in a Broadway show. All while doing battle with the floods of tourists – both foreign and domestic. When the hordes were literally flooding one way there was no choice but to dodge down a cross street and choose a new avenue with a more helpful ebb and flow. At the Majestic Theatre, we stood with a well behaved mob that could easily have stormed the building had it wanted but was was too busy flailing its arms and talking in tongues. ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ – (“New York’s longest running Broadway show!”) clearly still has the power to pull. And the gall to fleece its captive audience. A beer, a soda water, and a packet of M&Ms cost $27. Just try and do the math, it’s fun. We must have smirked because the bartender just shook jazz hands and sang, “It’s Broadway!”

The return train ride was similarly beatific for the two hours of forced relaxation. Sadly, the returning parent-chaperones were anything but relaxed. While the same excited children giggled, squealed, and fought over iPhone games, their frazzled mothers slowly unraveled. One woman was lacing her remonstrations with pretty stiffly worded threats, which sort of detracted from any greater sympathy we may have had. Still, it certainly appeared her 24 hours in the city with three children, had not been restorative. One performance of the Rockettes at Radio City, five meals out, a museum trip, and shopping had left her bereft of Christmas spirit. The children really weren’t too bad but she squawked mercilessly all the way home. And she still has ten shopping days ‘til Christmas.

Shelve the Elf

2011-12-08T17:00:00.000-05:00

If you’ve been living under a festively painted rock you may have escaped hearing about the Elf on the Shelf, Santa’s cute little plastic-faced, red felt-bodied emissary. Catapulted to national fame after Pottery Barn picked it up as a box set, the Elf on the Shelf is no longer the quiet staple of grandma’s sleepy craft boutique. Instead, the stealthy little elf that resides in American houses by day and flits back to the North Pole to report to Santa by night was interviewed at the 2011 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and, now starring in his first movie, will shortly be coming to a cinema near you.

The proliferation of Christmas elves has all the hallmarks of an alien invasion. First, the accompanying book creates a plausible back-story to maximize human buy-in. Next, the elf bestows power on its new owners: children get to name it, love it and keep it, safe in the knowledge their personal elf will return each year. The more insidious concept of being constantly watched, analyzed, and judged as naughty or nice by a sort of ten-inch elfin child psychologist is not yet viewed by young children as creepy or tattle tale. Similarly, they overlook the clear double-agent role of elves working as an extension of the long arm of the parental law: “Remember, your elf is listening…”

Just as the Elf on the Shelf is becoming a mandatory purchase (“Mummy, why do all my friends have an elf that comes to live with them before Christmas, except me?”), no-one thinks to share the pressure that accompanies his arrival. Once you have an Elf, there’s no ditching him. You can’t just pack it in and tell the children that their elf (Small Paul for us) can’t be bothered to change location every night and has gone back to Santa to cool his heels in the lead up to Christmas. No. Every morning the children rush into our bedroom chomping at the bit to run downstairs and see where our elf has landed.

This means that at least twice a week I awake in a panic realizing I didn’t move our elf. I nudge my comatose husband. “Did you remember to move Small Paul?” “No”, he groans. If I’m lucky I can slip downstairs and swiftly change his location; if not I might find a small slippered child sitting on the floor beneath him worrying why he hasn’t moved.

This is where powers of parental creativity must not be underestimated. The addition of a cookie next to the elf guarantees he must have jumped down and helped himself to a cookie but forgotten to find a new spot. (Perhaps he was tired and hungry.) After a late return from date night, perhaps he had been nervous to fly home with a babysitter still awake in the sitting room. (Perhaps it left insufficient time to make the trip back to the North Pole between our arrival and the morning.) On very rare occasions, our elf has even been known to add to the mystery with a location change during breakfast. How he did it, we’ll never tell.

The elf book is a critical piece of packaging. Not only does it provide the essential back-story and explain the elf’s role in advising Santa, it reinforces the Big Guy’s omniscience. It also establishes the ground rules: 1. Your elf can’t talk to you (but you can talk to him). 2. You can’t touch your elf (or he’ll lose his magic and ability to fly). 3. Your elf can’t move while you’re there. In other words, your elf has a job to do, and even if you’re pounding the heck out of your little brother the elf’s only there to observe, not intervene. Sort of like a professional journalist.

Either as a demonstration of the total power over elf-hosting parents (remember the alien analogy?), or as an online aid to their frantic relocation efforts, Mission Elf grows every year. The craft website, Pinterest, has hundred of photos of creatively hidden elves absailing down cabinets, drinking maple syrup through straws, and toasting S’mores over a tea light. If you’ve been tearing your hair out over elf hiding places, this site will put a little sparkle back in your strategic repositioning.

The nocturnal pressures of relocating your elf can be tough, but now entering any big box store presents its own danger. The imminent Elf on the Shelf movie means shelves are now jam-packed with swag. Since you can’t touch the real elf, there’s a plush cuddle version (handy since that’s been on our daughter’s wish list since August). The androgyny of the original elf has been clarified: girl elves have long eyelashes, pom-poms and skirts; boy elves don’t. Though if you fancy modifying the gender of your existing elf you can buy a couture skirt for $6.95.

Lucky us. Now we can be fearful of (a.) forgetting to move the elf, (b.) getting caught moving the elf, or (c.) bumping into a display unit packed with a bunch of elves on sale. Roll on Christmas! It’s time to shelve the elf.

Thanksgiving, How I Love Thee

2011-12-01T09:00:00.002-05:00

I sometimes bemoan the vanilla nature of my Anglo culture. We don’t have any Day of the Dead with prancing skeletons in diorama; the ghoulishness of Halloween has been hi-jacked by sweet furry animal costumes and scantily clad Disney princesses. We don’t typically fast, except for a few weeks pre-bikini season. Arguably, we have little in the way of ceremony beyond marriage and death. We don’t even put hexes on people or issue fatwahs. But we do flip pancakes and roll large cheeses down hills, and we do burn effigies of treasonous Guy Fawkes on bonfires, which is perhaps gruesome enough. All in all, we have a pretty interesting history of torture and conquest but it’s not really something that we bring up over dinner.

So, Brits and Americans have something in common: Our high days and holidays, at least in their secular rendition, are now 90% about food. Whether it’s because we spend the rest of the year being bombarded with healthy eating trends, gym membership specials and weight loss success stories, along comes a holiday we go hog wild. Fat Tuesday is at least unapologetic about it. Easter should be renamed Chocolate Fest. Christmas might deservedly be Cocktail Carumba, and Thanksgiving just gives us free license for third helpings when we wouldn’t normally have seconds. Take eggnog, when else would we freely and willingly drink high balls of sweetened heavy cream? It’s as if my free will and mental faculties have been replaced with nothing but desire every time I open the fridge door.

Thanksgiving morning in our house resembles the day after a keg party. Young houseguests are randomly littered about on sofas like rag dolls fired out of a cannon. The giant turkey that has dominated the fridge for days is suddenly the star of the show as its legs are unceremoniously stuffed in its neck and its innards are swapped out with an autumn medley of apples, onions and garlic. I manage to feel bad for him whether it’s the glorious fulfillment of his destiny or his darkest hour. But payback is sweet, so this year he kept us waiting a full extra hour before his popper popped.

Thanksgiving is one of those occasions when the hour or two spent eating doesn’t seem to justify the hours spent in preparation. I tried to quantify it for analysis:
3 hours grocery shopping and unpacking
4 hours cleaning the house and making guest beds
1 hour comprised of 2 last minute trips back to the supermarket
4 hours baking cookies and mince pies
5 hours dressing the turkey, peeling and cooking the vegetables, and making green bean casserole and firecracker cornbread from scratch.

That’s seventeen hours of labor swiftly dispatched for 2 hours of non-stop grazing time. And then we all sat around like a bunch of heavily pregnant women groaning about how much we had eaten. I could probably add in 2 hours of clean up, if, like us, you used your Kate Spade wedding china, which is all hand wash.

Among holidays, Thanksgiving takes the biscuit in its extraordinary homage to food. The inclusion of mandatory traditional dishes is only half the battle; gluttony and over-abundance also taxes the load-bearing capacity of any dining room table. And so the days following Thanksgiving are nothing short of an Ode to the Great Gastronomic Spread. Oh, Thanksgiving, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways you that will be reincarnated and re-served. I’d have rustled up a turkey pot pie or bubble and squeak but this year my husband took charge of the leftovers with a personal reinterpretation of a friend’s recipe. The result? The ultimate cross between a cottage pie and lasagna: a base of pie crust layered with stuffing, turkey, roasted vegetables, gravy and cranberry sauce topped off with smashed potatoes and baked. Don’t turn your nose up, it was practically Biblical.

That’s where we could leave things, plump and heavily satiated for another year. The trouble is Christmas, now a mere four weeks away. If Thanksgiving is our annual shout out to American holiday tradition, Christmas is when I bust out the best of British with Yorkshire pudding, bread sauce, crispy roast spuds, and a beautifully trussed turkey gracing the table. And with my parents hopping the pond to join the feast, the pressure’s on. After going PC with the addition of Pilgrims and Native American Indians to the children’s Little People play set, we decided to up the ante. I’m not quite sure what the neighbours will make of the Union Jack now gracing the doorway along side the Colonial American flag, but it does make for a doubly festive statement.

(Updated from 2008)

Thanksgiving,

2011-11-29T20:27:00.001-05:00

Stir It Up

2011-11-24T09:00:00.000-05:00

Well, Anglo-gourmands, if you didn’t know, this past Sunday was Stir-Up Sunday. Not a reason to channel your inner Bob Marley, (though any day is a good day to try). In the UK, Stir-up Sunday comes pre-loaded with booze, fruit, suet, and tradition as the last Sunday before Advent when we prepare our Christmas cakes and mince pies to give it all ample time to mature. I love the idea that right as we’re bearing down on the whole madhouse that is Christmas, especially today’s commercial, social, festive frenzy, we should put on the brakes, don our domestic hats and pulverize dry fruit.

I do have wonderful childhood memories of making Christmas cakes with my mother from scratch. We’d carefully roll out a smooth marzipan mantle to drape over the Christmas cake, beat icing into stiff peaks, press tiny silver baubles into place, and compose miniature scenes with quirky Christmas figurines year after year. And when that was done, we’d brine and bread a huge ham for Boxing Day. I can’t remember if we made our plum puddings but I know they took hours to steam in their cheesecloth wraps. Who knows, we probably whipped up mini soufflés for tea and shook up the perfect martini in our kitchen pinnies.

The tradition of Stir-up Sunday may be something of a dinosaur to the masses but, in the states, the proximity of Thanksgiving to Christmas – with just four short weeks in between – does a good job of getting the ball rolling. Thanksgiving is all about the little things: about taking time to prepare a home-cooked feast, try out new twists on traditional recipes, and produce gargantuan quantities to feed on demand to households of family and friends.

I view Stir-up Sunday as a sneaky chance to test-drive a mini version of the T-Day spread and get a head start on the plates of cookies I’ll be called on to produce for a host of mandatory cookie swaps. This weekend things were decidedly busy in our house but I was determined to try. Cheating just a little, I bought a trussed, seasoned, ready to roast chicken that any living thing with opposable thumbs could cook. On Sunday morning, it still felt important to bake so I busted out a Nigella Lawson scone mix, an excuse for pre-measured flour, salt and sugar. Add butter and milk and - voila! – freshly-baked scones. My father-in-law has a weak spot for old fashioned mince pies so I decided to make those too. Only let’s say I bought my pastry and used imported jars of British mincemeat. They still look pretty but let’s stay mum about the shortcuts.

Thanksgiving is my favourite adopted American holiday, one I can literally get my chops into. It’s beauty lies in the fact that there’s a whole lot of eating, plenty of booze (eggnog!) and absolutely no presents. Despite being steeped in the very earliest of American history, it seems decidedly atypical of the advertising industry to actively promote home-cooking and unabashed gluttony with virtually no knock-on commercial benefit outside the farm or supermarket. It doesn’t seem as though the new selection of Thanksgiving greeting cards has really taken root and, being sandwiched between Halloween and the winter holidays, there’s no demand for Pilgrim costumes or seasonal gift wrap.

Despite the season, a friend announced she had made the decision to give up coffee and wine. The very idea made me shudder. Coffee and wine are two of my absolute favourite things happily marking the start and end of my day, caffeine and tannins be damned. And since Thanksgiving is a time of to name all the things for which you’re thankful, I realized mine are all things that bring me daily happiness and joy. While I’m thankful for my coffee and wine, I’m also thankful for our perpetually well-stocked pantry so that I can create ever more complex dinners, even when my dining companions are often under 5 years old. I’m especially thankful our new boiler produces piping hot, steamy showers to rival any Old Spice ad. And I’m thankful for my chaotic household that can make me laugh and feel utterly crazed all at the same time.

If, like me, you didn’t quite get to grips with your cookies and pies from scratch on Stir-up Sunday, worry not. When you’re sitting around your turkey, or tofurkey, be grateful for a guilt-free holiday season and give thanks for the stable of celebrity cooks that are bound to see us through.

(Repeat post from Nov. 2010)

Upstairs, Downstairs, and in My Lady's Chamber

2011-11-17T09:00:00.000-05:00

I haven’t had a television crush since ‘Lost’, the ABC series, ended. First came a period of mourning, like the gaping hole left in turning the last page of a gripping book. Then came the interlopers, friends suggesting all sorts of shows I held at arm’s length, especially Glee, to which I am strangely, and gratefully, impervious. No, I needed a new sort of obsession, one where I’d be on the edge of my seat with anticipation waiting for the next week’s installment.

There was a point in pre-child life where we briefly became hooked on “24”, a full season in arrears. But back then we had the luxury of cramming in three episodes a night slouched on the sofa without a single interruption from adverts flogging Cialis and Pajama Jeans (was this really smart marketing for the show’s target demographic?), or Small Children appearing at the bottom of the stairs. Television barely gets a look in these days. All the more amusing since my husband made the installation of a flat-screen priority number one in our house move. Still, since AppleTV sends photos from our computer floating across the television screen, it makes for excellent wall art. Even when a frequently recurring image is my friend’s father in his Speedos.

‘Downton Abbey’, the BAFTA- and Emmy-award winning British period drama television series (there’s no acronym for that), has just wrapped after two wildly successful seasons in the UK. Everyone has been talking about it; even New York magazine devoted a few column inches to some of Lady Grantham’s acid-tipped zingers earlier this year. My own parents wouldn’t take my call when they were settling in for the much-anticipated season finale. And the show entered the Guinness Book of Records as “the most critically acclaimed television show”, with 11 Emmy nominations, beating out Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy and Modern Family. What sort of period drama has that kind of power, I wondered. Two minutes into Episode 1, Season 1, I had my answer. I was chomping at the bit like a goat at a salt lick. A bad Downton Abbey habit had formed.

Apparently, US offerings of British programmes, especially those served up on PBS Masterpiece Theatre, shake the molecular cells of Brits and Americans alike. With all the stately homes that function as impossibly glamorous backdrops, it seems to be a genre of programming Brits do rather well. Brideshead Revisited and House of Eliott both made the move to Masterpiece Theatre and I have been cornered more than once at social events by fierce PBS aficionados keen to discuss the 2011 re-run of Upstairs, Downstairs. Long before the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, hottie Sean Bean was steaming things up in the 90’s with BBC adaptations of Clarissa and Lady Chatterley. And the Special Relationship was cemented with the British-American whodunit movie, Gosford Park, a huge box office hit on both sides of the pond. In short, the tristes, intrigues and dirty secrets between the sheets and lives of the aristocracy and those in domestic service, continues to tickle our collective fancy.

While I’m soaking up every line of Downton Abbey, my husband has fallen for yet another zombie series, ‘The Walking Dead’. Zombies rear their lolling heads and shuffling feet every few years but this series has managed to hook great swathes of our friends, even those who had hitherto succumbed to the peppy antics of Glee. (Perhaps they were now suitable fodder for the brain-eating zombies in the former.) Besides an obvious revulsion, it seems a no-brainer to pass up the noisy gorging of the undead for gorgeous scenery, glamorous dresses and sanguine scandal to boot.

With only fifteen episodes to the entire series, a twice-weekly habit will take me through the Christmas season. And when the last episode ends, I won’t have to wilt on a chaise longue or wait to be revived with smelling salts. No, word is there will be a ‘Downton Abbey Christmas Special’ that should tide me over to the New Year. After that, it’s any man’s guess whether 2012 will bring with it any new guilty pleasures. But I can guarantee it won’t be Glee. Or Zombies.

I just want it to work!

2011-11-10T09:00:00.001-05:00

It doesn’t seem too much to ask, does it? We just want things to work given our busy lives on the go, in constant communication, publishing our statuses in sound bites of 140 type characters or less. Houses and cars have docks for iPods and talking hands-free. Music stored on computers is played through televisions and controlled via iPhones. You can even start certain cars remotely out of state.

“Don’t forget to change your clocks and check your alarm”, my parents warned with the daylight savings imminent. “Oh, our phones will adjust themselves”, I told them, “and we don’t really rely anything else.” Of course they do, and of course we don’t. After all, we may not consider ourselves the type that might comfortably bark obscenities at domestic help, but woe betide the misbehaving smart-phone that steps out of line.

Even as I write, my blood pressure is still simmering after battling with my wireless Epson printer. It’s hands-down my cleverest recent acquisition: it prints from my iPhone, talks to my laptop, intuitively knows when a document needs photo paper or bog-standard letter, until today -- when I really want it to print – and it acts up like a bolshy five year old with selective hearing.

Like many, the morning alarm signals the departure of an unstoppable train: The Day. But first, in bed, ever so quietly, before the rustle of moving eyelashes changes the atmospheric pressure and automatically wakes the children, you check texts, prioritize urgent email, and make several witty comments on Facebook. Then it’s on: hurtling around, clothing small children, smearing butter on toast, packing lunches, throwing on clothes, wiping sticky fingerprints off that clean cream top, chucking in laundry, feeding pets, checking for panda eyes from last night’s mascara. And somehow it’s accomplished with a good degree of patience, even when the two year old has a small explosion on your way out the door. No, if you want to see real frustration, it’s when those small fingers have mashed all the keys on the universal remote (a.k.a. life support for the TV, DVD, and DVR combined) and now there’s no way to get the button-less, flat-screen, television to turn on, or off.

That palpable frustration creeps up when I can’t find features on my Mac that I used to use on my PC. It’s when the printer says there’s a paper jam, though there isn’t. It’s when I want a gadget to do something, and it just won’t work. Let’s call it Tech Rage.

On the heels of Facebook’s now infamous changes, my email service, Gmail, has decided it needs a facelift too. And it’s dreadful. I realize the people who actually work at these companies are paid to spend their days dreaming up ways to improve and sexify their product. And make no mistake, it’s more of a product than a service because, in the cut-throat world of social media, competition is fierce and your data, I mean loyalty, is the goal. Gmail won its devoted followers by grouping conversation threads and being completely different than anything out there. The facelift means buttons are in different places, drop down menus reign, and… who on earth has time for this? I just want it to work in the five minutes I have between emailing my editor and school pick up.

If I’d wanted to treat myself to an experiment of Bedlam, I’d have chosen October and crammed as many houseguests, germs, and sick days into one month as I could -- and then I’d sign up for two online courses. After an early submission faux pas, a personal communiqué to a class lecturer via email (Sacré bleu!) instead of the online site (“…that’s the way it’s supposed to be and the way I prefer it”) I was in a race to catch up on two weeks of homework, several critiques, and a submission to my class. Chastised, and desperate to make amends, (call it a classic abuse scenario), I called a sitter, slogged away in the library, served up a home-made National Trust Cottage Pie (call me Martha), sailed through the bed-time routine, and scurried to turn in my homework at 11:25pm.

12:01am is the online bewitching hour when your posted homework appears on the class chart in yellow, the scarlet letter of late submissions, instead of the refreshing apple green of ‘submitted on time’. I was not alone. Online Tech Support told me the site had detected an unusual amount of activity, and shut down to reboot services. Fortunately the exchange was via email so noone had to see the exhausted woman, clutching at her hair and screeching, “I just want it to work!”

Rainy Days and October Snow Days

2011-11-03T09:00:00.000-04:00

If snow in October is going to be the next big thing in New York, I’m going to have to pass. As it stands, winter in New York already monopolizes a good six months of the year. If we’re going to tack on an extra two months it changes the ratio from unbearably cold half of the time to unbearably cold two thirds of the time, and with fractions like that I may as well live in Alaska. Which, let’s be clear, I never could.

We had houseguests from England last week, and after a morning tour of the always-fabulous New York State Museum, I took them on a brisk and windy lap of the Empire State Plaza. A lap that chilled our bones and left us looking pale and red-nosed in the photos outside the Capitol building and the strangely-shaped but infamous Egg, so I gave them the remaining tour of New York’s fine Capital by car. From this vantage point we caught our first glimpse of the tent city that’s popped up opposite City Hall as home to the dedicated souls of Occupy Albany. And then yesterday, after this first hideously early snowfall of the year, headlines were marveling at the protestors’ gumption, both upstate and down, in brushing off the snow to stick it out. Politics aside, with snow in the picture and only canvas between them and the stars, it’s hard to have anything but admiration for such dedication and resolve.

It appears New York’s weather hasn’t always been so contrary, (except for that little patch back in 1987), unless our day to day expectations have been twisted by the crystal ball gazing of television meteorologists. Nonetheless, my years in upstate New York seem to have coincided with some sort of meteorological adolescent turmoil. Here, it’s easy to spend six months of the year in a euphoria of warm weather relief and Vitamin D-ecstacy during which time you kid yourself into believing the winters aren’t so bad and the likelihood of a power outage pretty slim. But beside the predictable several feet of snow and sub-zero temperatures that take up the other half the year, recent winters have included freak weather conditions that recalled individually are memorable. Taken together, I can’t help but wonder why I couldn’t have closed my eyes and stuck a pin in Miami or Honolulu.

Over the past eight years we’ve battened the hatches against gale force winds that smashed the outdoor dining table, tossed the chairs in the bushes like a drunk hooligan, and skewered the sun umbrella in blackberry briars half an acre away. There were the mini tornados that ricocheted around town and touched down close enough to siphon up a local store’s lawn tractors and scatter them across fields like candy. We hunkered down in ice storms that glazed our cars like doughnuts, snapped limbs off crystallized trees, downed solid power lines and burned at least one house to the ground. And there was the year we spent a five-day power outage relentlessly stuffing logs into the red-hot woodstove and sleeping, colonial-style, huddled together on a mattress in front of the heat source. Oh, the glamour of reading by spelunking headlights, the culture shock of almost a week without the Internet, telephone or TV, and the naïveté of friends who always ask why we didn’t go to a hotel. For the last time, if the fire went out the pipes would freeze.

Given the extreme weather makeover, my husband has been after a generator. But with our mild weather amnesia, it finally took a summertime hurricane to justify the expense. When Irene finally made her way up to New York, my husband was in line at Lowes at 6am, first to greet the final pre-storm shipment of generators. Let me just put this in print: the generator has paid for itself in spades. I don’t know what I may have asked for Christmas this year but I’ll accept the generator with a side of humble pie. With four large trees down, one hanging on the power lines for three days, the generator had plenty of play. Power outages in the winter aren’t much fun but at least the contents of the freezer do well outside. Lose power in the summer and you can’t even keep a pint of milk cold.

In the grand scheme of things, last weekend’s pre-Halloween snowstorm wasn’t so bad. Our power outage lasted less than twenty-four hours, the generator handled the lights and the fridge-freezer, and we spent a curious Sunday sledding in the morning sunshine and making snowmen before buying cornstalks, carving pumpkins and hopping on a Halloween hayride. I’ll take the novelty in stride the same way I consider my mastery of the snow blower a new life skill. I’m just hoping someone in New York’s current administration is fast-tracking that statewide Climate Change Action Plan. 2050 is looking an awfully long way off. Perhaps I should wait to see how the rest of this winter goes before clicking my heels together and whispering, “Cuomo, I’ve a feeling we’re not in New York anymore.”

Penny for...the End of October

2011-10-27T09:00:00.000-04:00

Somehow, no matter how organized things are for the start of the school year – and baring in mind that was only a few short weeks ago -- it’s always this time of year that goes pear-shaped. In part, I blame the procreative habits of my peers since more than half the under-five set we know were born between October and December. (The other half fall between January and March. Beyond that, the summer is strangely bereft of birthday babies). This means weekends now through the holidays will be stuffed with a round-robin of parties at museums and paint-your-own pottery places. Just as the celebration circuit gathers steam, I’m running out of it thanks to an excess of soccer, ballet, swimming, and read with me library classes in which I enrolled my children during the haze of an endless summer.

To complicate things, October has turned out to be the winning month to indulge in a little professional development, namely two online classes. Not classes that can be conveniently followed with a glass of wine in hand, but ones involving weekly assignments, discussion groups and mandatory commentary on fellow students’ work. Of course, during sign up, I may have failed to anticipate the first round of school colds that would wipe out both children, keep them home from school, and knock out the babysitter. And I may have missed out on predicting the nocturnal forays of our two year old that ensure I’m up every two hours during the night.

The net result is a whole new level of tiredness - a sort of punch drunk, my-aren’t-those-lights-bright sort of confusion that affects both common sense and social grace. For much of one happy morning I believed the miniature lap giraffes shown via live web cam were real instead of part of a DirecTV ad campaign. And at a wedding I demonstrated the true meaning of “goldfish memory” after firmly introducing myself to a guest’s new husband, twice, thirty minutes apart.

October acts as the gateway to non-stop entertaining. It ushers in our daughter’s birthday which precedes Hallowe’en by only a week and leaves just enough time to research recipes before Thanksgiving and Christmas. Having successfully conned her into Hallowe’en themed guest goodie bags last year, she turned the tables with a request for a magical fairy princess unicorn party -- no parachuting skeletons allowed. Fifteen five year olds and three-dozen pink cupcakes later, the floors were awash with fairy glitter, gossimer wings were coming off, and Cinderella, the guest entertainer, showed up with her wig slightly askew adding the curious feeling she may have run through a hedge backwards on her way in.

More than half of the party guests seemed content to rehash their fairy princess outfits for Hallowe’en, but our children have long been chomping at the bit to transform into a jellyfish and a lobster. Now, armed with assorted fabric, bunting, and several rolls of bubble wrap, my course for the remaining evenings this week has clearly been set.

The arrival of All Hallows’ Eve brings no respite from the arts and crafts movement. November 5th, or Guy Fawkes Night, is one of those peculiar annual British traditions, (along with rolling large cheeses down hills and pancake flipping) that is fun precisely because of its ancient roots. Less than a week after Hallowe’en, we’ll be stomping about in the garden, stuffing old clothes with leaves and balled up newspaper to make a life-size effigy of Guy Fawkes, the poor sod caught under the Houses of Parliament with a few barrels of gunpowder. Sure, others were in on the treasonous plot to blow up the King in 1605 -- 13 to be exact -- but for the past 406 years British children have been making effigies of this poor guy before tossing him on a burning pyre and celebrating with a sky full of fireworks.

In a bid to get a head start on things, I started amassing several piles of leaves but my enthusiasm waned after my husband reported seeing a five-foot rat snake scuttling out from one pile and sidling into the pond. We may be on track for a jellyfish and crustacean, but I’m pretty certain we’ll need a Guy Fawkes Plan B.

All the Rage for Portaloos

2011-10-20T09:00:00.002-04:00

There are things I do, and things I try really, exceptionally hard to avoid. High on my top 10 favourite list would be dancing, especially in fabulous high heels. To hell with future bunions, although now that I personally know three women who have undergone the ghastly toe-breaking procedure required to reset their feet I do give it a little more thought. On my top ten no way I’d rather stab myself with a fork list would be porta-loos. Porta-loos, or porta-potties, as they are quaintly known stateside, have made a come back. As if I didn’t pay my dues at enough outdoor music festivals in my twenties, or the aromatic outhouse experience of our annual family camping trips, they are currently de rigueur on the social circuit, and in an ironic twist of fate we are supposed to enjoy it.

They’re a fixture at country weddings, bohemian outdoor parties, even town parks where the healthy taxpayer base that manages to spring for a water complex and an adventure playground is perfectly comfortable slapping two enormous porta-loos alongside. (Yes, Bethlehem, NY, I’m talking about you.) In fact, there’s such a market for portable outhouses you can opt for the common or garden blue variety more typically seen roadside with construction workers, or go upscale with deluxe trailer models complete with mirrors, vanities, and scented air. I’ve had mild porta-pottie anxiety ever since I witnessed the toppling of one with the occupant still inside. There’s an awful lot of blue dye in those things. Not to mention an awful lot of other unpleasant things. But it’s hard to deny their utility, and we jumped on the bandwagon for a party last year. The oversized single unit was billed as a step up from basic since it “includes a sink and toilet paper holder”, as if either one should be considered optional.

I found myself escorting my daughter into a blue porta-pottie at a recent wedding, (one with a backdrop of frothing rapids crashing over a craggy waterfall, you don’t get more boho-chic than that). Their blue Tardis, two of them actually, had scented air and a special shelf (definitely an upgrade) where you could place your handbag or purse. Outside was a table with a woven basket that literally runneth over with free toiletries. If the basket had been in the ladies’ room at the Saratoga Race Course we’d have been forking over dollars for the chance to pump some hand cream, or fish for floss and a half a pack of Tums.

Here, thanks to the mosquito madness, the overwhelming choice was bug spray. I grabbed an innocuous bottle, something organic, deet-free, and lemon-scented, and doused my daughter and self, head to toe – hair, dress, and country chic Wellington boots. (I was channeling the cover shoot from Town and Country.) Making our way back to the crowd, a pungent stench followed us like the cloud enveloping Pig Pen. I kept stopping to sniff. Finally I sniffed my daughter’s head and the penny dropped. We – my daughter and I - smelled like stinky wet dog thanks to the repellent I had so liberally applied. Our arrival, immediately following a publicly-requested call of nature in a porta-loo, brought vibrant new meaning to ‘eau de toilette’. Luckily the stench prompted a team effort to mask our pong with a host of offerings from air fresheners to spilled booze.

This past weekend, the wedding involved a huge peak topped marquee and a deluxe, all white, trailered porta-pottie. The set up had discrete side entrances for the ladies and gents, three stalls for each, and the ubiquitous fresh air upgrade. It also came with the free wicker toiletries basket option. I passed. Considering it’s geared up for special occasions, the designers seriously overlooked a key detail: the unreasonableness of expecting women in stiletto heels to ascend a flight of metal stairs. They might as well have added a miniature ice rink or obstacle course in the foyer. (And if I wanted people to see my Spanx I would have found a way on the dance floor, much like the guest at my brother’s wedding who kept sending her skirt north.) The deluxe porta-potty bus was so much like ascending mobile airline boarding stairs that in the stall I half expected the whole unit to drive off.

Fortunately, despite dancing the night away in my killer BCBG five-inch heels, I wasn’t the unfortunate lady clinging to the bathroom handrail after slipping on a stair. Nor the gentleman carried off in an ambulance with a sprained ankle and concussion from falling on the dance floor. My luck was in. Having seen the inside of at least six portable toilets in six months, I’m just glad no-one tipped the porta-potty over.

Triple Threat

2011-10-13T09:00:00.001-04:00

It’s always alarming to learn of rampant viruses hitting the neighborhood. Early summer reports of the brain-eating amoeba typically contracted by dive-bombing into freshwater lakes and ponds were somewhat off-putting. Harmless if ingested through the mouth, the pressure of water rushing into your nasal cavity apparently pushes the amoeba far enough into your head that it migrates in search of some tasty algae and makes do with a simple supper of brain tissue. I had seen a 20/20 news report on some cases in mid-west lakes but the idea of New York playing host was a little tough to snort or swallow.

Now in recent weeks, the Capital Region has had its first case of West Nile Virus, blamed on this season’s proliferation of storm-imported mosquitoes. Thanks to Hurricane Irene, and enough incessant rain to prompt endless Facebook jokes about Ark building, the ground is saturated. Every new rainfall transforms back yards into standing water swimming pools. Friends who bought a local new home this summer sent around a photo with them mock swimming in the giant puddle that used to be their back lawn.

I had no idea there were agencies out there charged with mosquito eradication efforts. That is, until I heard Chris Horton, Superintendent of aptly-named ‘Berkshire County Mosquito Control’ giving a helpful interview on the news: "They’re diabolical. The mosquito knows when water's receding from a flood plain; it knows that water will flood again and it lays its eggs on the edge of that water. When the water comes up the egg instantly hatches into larva and starts its development." That explains why every wellie-clad stroll across the back garden prompts swarms of mosquitoes to rise up and dive-bomb anything with a pulse.

Just exiting the car requires a military strategy to avoid the mosquito ambush. And, now, with school photo week coming up, all the Pre-K children look as though they have been afflicted with a strange spotted pox. Between the post-Hurricane Irene mosquitoes and the usual collection of pre-school bruises, our offspring look like protégés from a Mike Tyson boot camp. Our youngest has a bug bite under his eye, and another on his eyelid, adding just enough puffiness and reddish-purple glow to pass as a shiner. The elder breaks out in huge swollen welts with each bite. Each morning at school, children arrive in clouds of California Baby and Skin-So-Soft while Mums and Dads line up giant bottles of organic, Deet-free bug repellent next to lunch boxes for quick re-application.

The physical assault doesn’t stop with mosquito bites. Just a few weeks back at school and the children are covered with bruises from playing umpteen rounds of something close to ‘It’s A Knock-Out’ on the playground. Last year, I counted twenty-eight small bruises on my daughter’s legs, imagined some ghastly inquiry, and decided I had to bring it up with the teacher. I needn’t have worried. Apparently, the rough and tumble on pre-school playgrounds and clumsy nature of little legs shod with sensible but clumpy Stride-Rite footwear is a known lethal combination.

This week my son returned to pre-school with a long green bruise down his cheek, the result of acrobatically toppling into the edge of an open fly screen door. He’s pretty pleased with the look; makes him a dead ringer for a pirate. I’m less thrilled about the effect in school photos. I’m guessing it won’t make this year’s Christmas card.

Despite the shiny lunch boxes and new shoes, back to school has headaches beyond bug bites and bruises. My four year old has plenty to say about staying all day on Tuesdays. Her dissatisfaction is first voiced on the school run and again at key points during the day, namely lunch and afternoon snack-time, at which point she snags a teacher to assist in writing frank letters of indignation. The early written protests have softened a little since the start of term. We’re down to just one firmly worded letter a week, typically stating: “I do not like having to stay at school all day. But I do like school.” We appreciate the afterthought. The modification came after we suggested her demands to be released “from jail” might unnerve her classmates and teacher. Judging by the artistic output she’s managing to have a very productive time, and, in a school where children and staff are already on first-name basis, she clearly has free rein to publish her feelings of injustice.

In a roundabout way

2011-10-06T09:00:00.001-04:00

Summer in the US means roadwork. At every turn, in towns and on highways, roads have been under construction. Or so it seems. There’s more than one stretch of Interstate in upstate New York that has arguably been in a constant state of resurfacing and repair for five years straight. Not widening the road. Not adding lanes. It’s like the painters on the Golden Gate Bridge: the minute they finish it’s time to start over.

These road crews work through the night, in storms, driving rain, even during the morning rush hour when they take their lives in their own hands just waving the traffic on with their little red flags. One late night return from Cooperstown we saw a tractor trailer that had missed a series of cones and lane closed signs and barreled into the back of a stationary construction vehicle. Whether the truck driver had fallen asleep was unknown, but the stadium-bright lighting evidently hadn’t been sufficient.

I must have exhaled my sympathy one too many times since my five year old now shakes her head saying, “Look, Mummy. Those poor, poor men working in the rain.” At least she’s picking up on the sympathy rather than my cat-like abhorrence of working outside in inclement weather. The subject of her sympathy is a four-way intersection that has been under construction all summer. Diggers have ripped up all four corners, great tracts of dirt scooped up, and with the chaos coupled with Hurricane Irene’s rains, we’ve had to trust the master plan.

American roads are surely the hardest working strips of tarmac the world over. From high school on, the average American owns some sort of car. Americans love cars, and they love to drive. In the UK, suggest a night out to friends and what follows is a convoluted series of contortions about Billy getting to John’s house for Vicky to pick up before stopping at Sally’s on the way. And the return leg is simple: call a cab. Over here, once a plan is set, a dozen attendees will show up in a dozen cars. I know when my husband’s band practice is about to start simply by counting cars in the drive. God forbid anyone actually carpool.

Last week I walked in on a conversation among parents at school pick up. “I hate roundabouts,” one mother lamented. “Must be taking a leaf out of Massachusetts’ book,” I ventured, not wanting to give away my palpable excitement at the news that the ripped up four-way intersection would soon be circular. Judging by the faces around me, consensus agreed the new traffic pattern coming to the neighborhood was putting a crimp in the status quo of the school run.

There is no doubt New York has gone roundabout crazy. When Chatham and the DOT came up with a new traffic pattern that would involve a small traffic circle I was thrilled. Randomly coming across the big bertha that is Pittsfield’s roundabout was like discovering a portal to Europe. Back in New York, Delmar revamped Route 85 with not one but three roundabouts to reach the Slingerlands Bypass, and even the trip to my daughter’s ski lessons soon included the novelty of a roundabout in Schenectady of all places.

Roundabouts are popping up everywhere, but not all drivers have figured out how to use them. If you passed your driving test before 2005, chances are roundabouts weren’t covered and nothing has come in the mail with a refresher. Having suffered through the day-long classroom portion of a US driving test at the ripe old age of twenty-seven, I should know. (So what if I’d had a license since I was eighteen? Buying a car meant registering one, and registering requires a US license. The class of awkward but giddy sixteen year olds clearly thought I was a drunk driver required to retake the test or lose driving privileges forever.)

The trouble is that traffic circles only work if everyone agrees on how they work. Those waiting to join have to be willing to wait until those spinning around the middle safely pass them. And those on the roundabout have to be allowed to get off, hopefully using their blinking indicators, so that the people joining don’t push on and cut them off. I’ve tried all the traditional rules of engagement, pausing, giving way, indicating my intention to take an exit but experience overrules. It’s everyman for himself. Hesitate and you’re just as likely to be side-blinded by a cautious driver as driven off the road by an over-zealous one. I don’t know if public service announcements are an option but someone should intervene if New York is truly going to embrace roundabouts in anything more than a haphazard roundabout sort of way.

Dear Facebook,

2011-09-29T09:00:00.003-04:00

Dear Facebook,

We started off as friends. I told you a little about me, shared a photo or two, and frequently left my status enigmatically unwritten. In time, you helped me to reconnect with friends all over the world. I didn’t believe in “friending” people I saw everyday, or sharing the fruits of my culinary labours with friends leapfrogging over a twenty-year gap. Your ever-ready presence singlehandedly solved the issue of too few hours in the day for lengthy phone calls and too few friends of my age texting prolifically. Life could become a series of public greetings, conversations that only friends in my network would get, and nostalgic references too irresistible for them not to pass comment.

Facebook, after a while you began to get on my nerves. Your constant pairings with new applications took its toll. I tried to understand that you were changing, and people were looking for new ways to show friends were in their thoughts. But the importance placed on watering, planting and nurturing all these Facebook gardens, the constant barrage of leafy gifts from friends secretly trying to earn points to buy shrubs and garden tools was trying. In time, I ignored the donations, and let my garden wither and die. I began to delete your major wall apps: my garden, my aquarium, the world map of places I had visited. The writing was on the wall when someone unleashed the Facebook farm application. Too late to dodge the bullet, a chunk of the friend requests I’d accepted with a modicum of skepticism turned out to be seated Farm enthusiasts flooding my wall and email account with notifications of their farming activities. When the same contingent embraced Bejewelled and Bedazzled it was over.

I’ve broken up with you at least three times. Twice early on for the ruinous amount of game-related drivel blocking my inbox, once, long after you blossomed into a user-friendly, friend-connecting, information sharing, enjoyable, socially relevant, important part of my daily routine. In other words, we were so serious I had cold feet about the amount of time we were spending together. It wasn’t you – it was me and my new friend, the iPhone. With a monthly data plan I could check on you first thing in the morning, anytime in the day, and every night in bed. I needed to know we could be apart, (at least for two weeks).

Twice more I left you for places where I barely had a cell-phone signal, let alone Wifi. When I came back, you had changed and I felt like a stranger finding my way around. You’d grown up. All the girly quizzes and gardens had been abandoned. You were more vital, connected. We were all nuzzling at your wall to share music, debate politics, and comment on moments in history. You alerted us to your inner changes too: changes to privacy settings, data you were collecting, decisions to track the locations of photos (just like Apple) to get a better sense of us, your adoring audience and how far we roamed.

You always seemed to accept that I liked to keep things private. My security settings matched my privacy settings. Friends only. Not friends of friends, no strangers, no public listing searchable on Google. Once in a while you slipped up though, didn’t you? You’d update some inner workings and manage to reset all the privacy settings to public view. I only panicked when some random people had found my page and commented on photos but with a few keystrokes I had reinstated the moat and drawbridge.

It’s been years since I sat down to spend quality time with you at a computer. With an iPad and iPhone at my finger tips, I take you for granted, use you to quickly comment on posts, “like” links, or gauge mass reactions to royal weddings and murder trials. Like a long-term partner, I’ve come to expect you to be there for me, as I am for you. Checking in for a news update, some shared photos, a good laugh. You shrink the world for me and absolve me of my responsibility to pick up the phone.

But now, Facebook, something’s changed. And this time it’s you, not me. You’re taking me for granted, telling me which friends to see (in a real time Ticker feed), what I want to read (in your Relevant news). Now you want to package our Facebook relationship with your archive service which I - talk to the hand – have rejected outright. You already use my data to feed scrolling adverts on my page, but word is you’re sinking to a new low. Fergie may have sold access to her Prince but I didn’t foresee you soliciting my friends for my missing data like lusty paparazzi, storing data even when I block it, or tracking my browsing moves on outside websites that use your Open Graph API data collection tool.

Breaking up is never easy, and it might take time, but there is someone else to soften the blow. WhatsApp for iPhone lets me share messages and photos with friends I would call if I had more time. They’re predicting you’ll have a billion registered users soon so I’m guessing you won’t miss a few who jump ship. But, Facebook, get a grip. You may have had our heads for a long time but you shouldn’t expect all our data on a silver platter.

Olympic Hurdle

2011-09-22T09:00:00.000-04:00

Have Olympic ticket sales always been such a hotbed of discontent or is Britain entering new territory? Quick Google searches don’t turn up much evidence of prior grumbling, neither among spectators nor Olympiads, which begs the question of whether Britain’s convoluted plan for ticket allocation parity – all those staggered lotteries and release dates, has, like orderly queueing, been a peculiarly British experience. Was Sydney 2000 swamped with a sea of angry Aussies frustrated by their poor odds at securing seats? Was Athens 2004 lambasted for giving away too many corporate tickets? And what about Beijing 2008? How did China handle things? Actually I was going to make a joke, but as it turns out Beijing really did come up with a one ticket per person rule for the opening and closing ceremonies and two per person for sporting events, strictly ruling out any block or group bookings. The Secretary General of the Beijing Organizing Committee acknowledged it was probably not a popular decision, but pointed out, “There are just too many of us Chinese. We’ve taken this policy to ensure many more people can watch the games.” I’m guessing for the mob of disillusioned and ticketless Brits, it sounds like a mighty fair game plan.

After the agonizing wait for official notification, I was one of the lucky ones. At least so my congratulatory email told me. I opened the email with trepidation, feeling every inch like Charlie when he saw the gold edge of his winning ticket to the Chocolate Factory. But my excitement cooled when I read I’d only been awarded tickets to a single event. Even with all the buzz words and exclamation points welcoming me to The Greatest Show on Earth! – something I think Cirque du Soleil also likes to claim - I discovered I had 4 tickets for the Olympic rowing in Eton-Dorney, near Windsor. This is in my parents’ neck of the woods, and growing up in the Bucks/Berks area means I spent most teenage summers in Laura Ashley dresses admiring the bracing rowers at the Henley Royal Regatta and my late teens trying to get into some of Windsor’s more lax watering holes. Don’t get me wrong, Olympic tickets are Olympic tickets, but let’s just say I was at least hoping to see inside the London venues with tickets to the gymnastics, diving, or mens’ 100 metre finals.

Not to worry, with the lotteries over, the remaining tickets are still to be released for general sale. Except this week the Olympic Committee decided they will not be released in early December 2011 as promised, a deadline I’ve been waiting for like a pawing bull facing a Matador’s cape. Instead, they will be released in April 2012. A mere three months before the start of the Olympics in July. I don’t know how they expect people to feel good about this. It pokes giant holes in my own plans to center a family vacation around the Olympics and a milestone birthday. As it stands, the Olympic weeks have already jacked up prices of UK accommodations, and I have zero faith that the money-grubbing airlines won’t do the same.

Travel to the UK is notoriously expensive in the summertime. Go in February or November and you’ll get a bargain. Fly in peak season and you’ll pay twice or thrice for the privilege. High season accommodations hinge on the double whammy of pre-set school holidays and good weather odds and trump all other rates of the calendar year. So by the end of 2010 I had already made provisional enquiries to several property owners. Each replied that they had not yet decided their Olympic weekly rates and to follow up sometime in 2011. This summer I decided to do a little research to find out how property owners were being advised to price their moneymakers. As it turned out, the vacation home rental sites (vrbo.com, holidayletting.co.uk, homeaway.com) were unanimous in their advice: Depending on your location and its proximity to the Olympic events, you could feel good about increasing your weekly peak rate by 50%-200%. The mind boggles.

At this point, Olympic Committee Chair, Sebastian Coe, has managed to accomplish something extraordinary. By exerting pressure on supply and demand, people are willing to buy whatever tickets they can get their hands on. And in this way, less popular events are selling out just as swiftly as the predictable crowd draws. The big winner here is that the London Olympics 2012 is almost guaranteed to pay for itself, perhaps the biggest fear among organizers and stadium builders in any nation. And after the brouhaha over London’s costly Millenium Dome, it’s pretty clear no-one wanted to be left with the bill for an expensive white elephant.

As for me, I’m still scouring the internet for every helpful tidbit on securing Olympic tickets. I have my American husband signed up on US sites, and I’m signed in for UK updates. We’ve changed our game plan a little and may stay far from the madding London crowds closer to the coast before heading to the grandparents once the games start. Either way, we still won’t know our ticket fate until after April. Nothing like leaving things to chance. Just another Olympic hurdle in our way.

Nitty Nora the Bug Explorer

2011-09-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

It’s one of my earliest school memories: the school nurse making the rounds to each classroom, methodically walking the rows and carefully parting the hair of each seated child. We would groan as word spread like wild fire that Nitty Nora was on the way. And then we would sit perfectly still at our school desks, staring in trepidation at the etched graffiti in the wooden lids – a worn scrawl of initials, hearts, insults, and pop stars’ names - desperately hoping we wouldn’t be deemed unclean. Naturally the teachers made much of the fact that nits, hair lice by any other name, favour clean hair. But that wasn’t any better than a Manhattan hotel reassuring guests all rooms had been fumigated after the bed bug epidemic. Contamination sticks, and stigma by association is a bitter pill to swallow.

Around the age of seven years old, it was finally my turn. Mine, and most of my little girlfriends thanks to our break time huddles over marbles or class-time Chinese Whispers. I cried and was sent home with instructions to get special lice shampoo and a thin steel comb from Listers the Chemist, our high street pharmacy. The shampoo had a very distinctive smell, one I clearly recall, and after shampooing my mother carefully dragged the thin tines of the comb through my long hair, over and over to hunt for any tell-tale eggs still attached to the hair shaft or, worse, any little lice running for their lives.

The problem with hair lice, (or bed lice, or any other bugs visibly feasting on us), is that they have such a medieval feel. Adapted, as we are, with sensitive noses and complicated, highly-scented washing regimens, we are appalled by any type of body odour or whiffy clothing, let alone the idea of body lice and fleas. We go to great lengths to soap and scent our bodies, hair, and linens, before we follow it up with efforts to remove the bulk of our hair from our feet to our chins. So this throw back to Biblical times is an affront to our effort to be spotlessly clean.

After my pre-tween exposure, I was so horrified by the idea of human lice I was profoundly affected by one Bible story at Sunday School. While the rest of the Bible tales were squirreled away with Hans Christian Anderson and Aesops’s Fables, I never forgot the visual of Jesus wandering around in a lice-infested hair shirt for forty days and forty nights while the devil tempted him. Nor could I fathom why he didn’t just take it off (the practice of mortification being lost on me). It follows that I may have made some pre-pubescent equation of lice with the devil (plus the whole OT business of god punishing people with pestilence and plague). So when I stole from my brother’s chocolate stash I truly thought I might be punished with some sort of infestation.

This week my pre-schooler returned to school armed with her backpack, lunchbox, wellie boots and bug spray. She had been there for precisely one day when a school notice popped up in my email inbox. Nits, it explained, had been “visualized” at school and the nurse would now be conducting examinations of all students’ heads. As nits are most at home on the noggins of the three to twelve year old set, and on girls typically over boys, my child should be a shoe-in for contracting them. The school helpfully included a link so that parents could better educate themselves in the reproductive lifecycle and feeding habits of nits. Regrettably, the kidshealth link included additional information on the head louse’s distant cousin, the pubic louse, which, I learned, causes irritation of the eyelid in toddlers and preschoolers. When my daughter came home from school scratching her head and blinking excessively I was fastidious in hair follicle examination.

In three weeks, friends will be coming from England to stay. Having never been to NYC it makes sense that they want to spend a few days in town before heading upstate to us in the capital. On a whim I promised to make a reservation for a mid-town hotel and to join them, but bed lice complicated the plan. Almost every travel-booking site has information on the worst affected hotels, and despite the nightmare gently dissipating from the newspaper headlines, feedback on any hotel booking site lingers. Tales of nighttime nibbling, little black spots on sheets, and luggage infestations unwittingly brought home left me practically apoplectic. Mind you, helpful travelers shared their tactics: put your suitcase in the bath, hang your clothes on the shower curtain, never use the wardrobe, throw back the covers of the bed, and absolutely never, ever, walk barefoot on the carpet.

Since I haven’t viewed hotel bedspreads in the same light since the ABC network’s 20/20 body fluid special, I now consider myself forever changed in hotel stay practices. After three days of school, Nitty Nora has done her job and we have had no nit sightings. And, in a stroke of luck, I’ve been offered a friend’s unoccupied Manhattan apartment to assuage my fears of bed bug Russian Roulette.

Happiest at Work and Play

2011-09-08T09:00:00.000-04:00

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Maybe that’s why Americans are so fond of partying on Labor Day weekend. America’s work ethic is an admirable, if dogged pursuit. At parties, people love to swap horror stories of excessive 85 hour work weeks, unpaid overtime, unused vacation days, and valiant feats soldiering on despite hideous illness, sick days accruing in their leave-time bank. That’s all well and good if you plan to take a month or two off and burn those amassed days, but it doesn’t seem to happen.

The typical American vacation is about a week. Sometimes less. There’s little of the sort of summer time exodus you might see in France, when Paris decamps to the coast. Or the two and three week family vacations typically booked in the UK. Even New York’s summer escapes to the Hamptons or Jersey shore (at two ends of the spectrum), or even upstate into the ample bosom of Columbia County, tend to revolve around bucolic retreats or hedonistic Saturday nights crammed into willing weekends before the Monday morning commute crawls back around.

My initial foray into the American workforce was a shock. I would have ten vacation days for the year – the entire year! This in addition to, as the HR rep kindly pointed out, all the US national holidays. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to kiss her or the ground with gratitude. A later employer was sufficiently cynical about the use of sick days that all leave time was lumped into one. Employees were given a pretty decent three and a half week vacation package that included sick and personal days. Sure, you didn’t have to make up phony illnesses to tack a few days together but nothing burned more than spending a week on flu-ridden bed rest glumly regarding each day as another that wouldn’t be spent sunbathing on the beach.

After labouring outdoors before our own Labor Day party, I snuck out for a quick pedicure at an untested neighbourhood salon. The trio of Vietnamese staff was the friendliest I have ever encountered, extraordinarily chatty, and insatiably curious about Britain. “What were you like, originally, before the Romans came?” was the opening question. I told him how we ran around smothered in blue paint, largely factionalized and fighting one another. We have a lot of Nordic and North European blood but Rome really helped to sort things out with some roads and organization. “What about work?” he wanted to know. “Do you have the same sort of long workdays as Americans, working every day or just parts of the day? (I think he meant a midday siesta.) “No”, I told him. “We don’t work. The Queen pays for everything.”

With US unemployment at 9%, job losses affect not only those out of work but place greater burdens on remaining employees as they absorb the tasks of eliminated positions. And according to a new study, job dissatisfaction is at an all time high. The old notion of mutual loyalty to a firm, staying with them for 20 years or more, is long gone and far from being a negative, rapid job-hopping is sometimes admired. (Perhaps more for the implication that you’re being continually hired.) But along with the fluctuations in employment and the economy, there has been an overt increase in the quest for personal happiness. Much like the health market, online dating, or stress relieving activities like yoga, acupuncture, Pilates, or Tai-Chi, this trend extends beyond work – where most people spend the vast majority of their days – to the inner self, and a goal to proactively isolate elements that make us happy. Some personal quests have turned into books like Gretchen Rubin’s bestseller, “The Happiness Project” or Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love”, a tale that resonated so clearly with the masses that it was a movie before the ink was dry on the book’s second press. Now, a Gallup Well-Being poll is telling us that American workers are unhappier than ever at work. And this year’s ‘go to’ authors of “The Progress Principle” identify the cause as companies consistently missing the need for employees to feel as though their work is meaningful and contributing to progress.

This may be true but that American work ethic still persists: pride in never taking a sick day, pride in being too busy to vacation. Perhaps the authors of ‘The Progress Principle’ can compare happiness scores between employees who vacation and those who don’t. After doing all that work, don’t you think it might be OK to take a leaf out the European model and enjoy some of the R&R that your job affords? I’m going to guess advocates of this approach must be among the happiest of all. So, Happy Labor Day, America. (Don’t work too hard.)

Come on, Irene.

2011-09-01T09:00:00.000-04:00

Three days before Irene hit, home-life was much like a hurricane. The dog broke into the trash and thoughtfully spread it all down the driveway. Twice. After eating day old raw chicken and vegetable peels, he subsequently threw up in the house. Three times. The children, normally such good friends, decided now would be a good time to open hostilities. The word “mine” was receiving such a workout, we actually went to the library to find children’s books on the topic. When the four year old was really irked with the two year old she uninvited him to her birthday party, the retractable verbal benchmark among preschoolers that decides whether someone is your friend, or not. When the two year old was really irked with the four year old he resorted to age old Neanderthal practices with a slow but effective right-arm thump. I thought it had to be a full moon. Or exhaustion from eleven weeks of school vacation. Or back to pre-school blues. Then New York had an earthquake followed by a hurricane. And everything just made sense.

Its roots may be a compunction to control, quite possibly genetic, but I do not do well with chaos. I like to plan ahead, really far ahead if possible. The ongoing love affair with full year at-a-glance paper calendars is the legacy of corporate days merrily scheduling business travel up to a year or even eighteen months ahead. Regrettably, my husband does not share this passion and is typically not thrilled when I want to discuss Christmas plans in August or booking next year’s summer vacation two days after returning from this year’s holiday spot. But like Jack Sprat and his wife, there’s a place for planners and non-planners in this world. Without the expenditure of my energies, we may never schedule time to socialize with anyone, secure reservations or snag tickets to nearly sold out shows. Nonetheless, without my husband’s calm resolve, I may be left hand wringing and wearing ashes and sackcloth over inclement travel advisories and show cancellations.

Nearly three months ago I had planned ahead - with a similarly minded friend - to see the Mark Morris Dance Company at Jacob’s Pillow. The friend would travel up from Maryland for the weekend and we’d make a night of it with dinner al fresco, the performance, and a backstage meet and greet organized through her friend. To her credit, she kept a day ahead of Irene, making it into NYC Penn Station and upstate to Albany on subways and trains, all before Mayor Bloomburg shuttered the transit doors.

As hurricane Irene whipped up the east coast wreaking havoc in North Carolina and on, weather predictions here worsened until the prospect of getting to Jacob’s Pillow was questionable, and getting back was frankly ill advised. I called the box office. “Tonight’s performance will continue, without refunds,” I was told. Tanglewood cancelled their night’s event, and later Jacob’s Pillow would cancel performances for Sunday. But not for Saturday night. (Who makes these calls?) I’m guessing with the dance company in residence, the show had to go on. We later heard from the dancers that the show suffered a near empty audience and the Pillow some hefty downed tree limbs. Forget the refund, I’m disappointed to have missed the show at all, and a tad browned off at no mention of a partial comp for next season. Sunday was a glorious day of sunshine that meant the destruction of the previous twenty-four hours beggared belief. And with a comp, I’d have been at the matinee in a heartbeat.

We made it through the storm with just a few downed trees, one left dangling precariously on power lines and blocking the road, a snapped power cable with frayed ends trailing on the asphalt. After two days, with brave drivers and even a cyclist ignoring cones and gliding past, the power company reached us, confirmed the lines were “hot” (live) and shut off the power. We had tried to warn the cyclist as he peddled inches from the cable. I really had no urge to see how well his metal bicycle would conduct electricity. But some people clearly don’t like to adjust their plans and he had some place to be. No doubt he’d fit right in with the headstrong folks kayaking in the storm, or refusing mandatory evacuations.

Meanwhile with the excitement of the storm, power company trucks, downed trees, and tree surgeons, there’s plenty to occupy everyone at the homestead. The oldest Little is worried the storm blew the fairies out of the trees and is busy investigating. The youngest is concerned about snagging a ride in the NiMo truck’s crane. And if that’s all for now, I’d like to get back to planning. Thanks very much.

Packing It All In

2011-08-25T09:00:00.001-04:00

It seems to be a common pitfall of today’s parenting: over-thinking, over-planning, over-analyzing. At least, if I judge the parenting magazines by their covers – the ones that keep dropping into my mailbox and congratulating me on my pregnancy (I think they have me mixed up with someone else) – these are the primary concerns and mental gymnastics of parents, and I’d be happy to include myself as Exhibit A.

So what if my children haven’t had an official scheduled play-date in four weeks? It’s summer! Aren’t the children supposed to be outside catching butterflies and finding (or torturing) bugs? I’m an avid proponent of the organic outdoor play/mud-pie style of learning. Haven’t I made enough fairy baths with lavender oil bathwater for one summer? And surely the book reading, swimming lessons and trips to the beach and museums all count? But guilt prevails. Summer in the states is, no doubt about it, long. At least twelve weeks – quarter of the year in one flowing, unobstructed break. No wonder summer camp is such a right of passage over here. And so utterly absent in the UK where the summer holidays are half as long and the family vacation takes up fifty percent of it.

In our case, we managed to fit in a family holiday, some Adirondack camping, a little entertaining, a few houseguests, and at least half a dozen day trips. I saw the 4 year old through a series of swimming lessons, (right up until last week when she lasted only 15 minutes in the rain-chilled water before her lips turned blue and her tensed up body inhibited any sort of arm movement). We made ‘goop’, maxed out the paddling pool, worked on new bike skills, and painted ‘til the cows came home. To say that I have new respect for anyone working with toddlers and pre-schoolers is an understatement. I am exhausted.

There are less than two weeks to go before pre-school starts and the autumn class schedules have been released with the crack of gunshot at the races. Parents are falling over themselves, crashing the local library and YMCA vying for spots. I managed to get my four year old signed up for swimming, ballet, and soccer, and a special event for Winnie the Pooh’s 90th birthday party on September 8th. I was trying to decide whether there would room in the schedule for gymnastics or judo when I recovered my senses and realized if I kept this up I’d be nothing but a glorified cabbie by Thanksgiving. I have friends (ones I truly admire) whose every waking move is defined by the drop off and pick up schedule of their four sports-mad children heading to try outs, practices and games. I swore it wouldn’t be me but clearly it’s a slippery slope.

Meanwhile, my daughter’s pre-school came up with an ingenious plan. They sent home friendly, personalized notes, gently inviting our two year old to participate in a new pilot program for siblings of current students. They would join the Pre-K3 class for two half mornings a week, with only four spots available. Only four? I received the letter on Friday and was on the phone that night confirming our interest. Either admissions were light for the Pre-K3s this year or they’ve been mentally stamping ‘Future Student’ on the heads of all newborns at school drop off.

Nonetheless, the sudden imposition of structure on these endless summer weeks galvanized me into action. I’ve had a laundry list of “to dos” on hold for eons. That’s the thing about small children. Between all the swimming lessons, nature walks and craft projects, work is relegated to the farthest hours of the day, usually somewhere between 8pm and midnight when you’d rather be slouching on the sofa watching educational (or mind-numbing) TV. But there’s something about a milestone year – in my case, a full 365 days before the big 4-0, that has spurred me on. If over-planning is good enough for our children, it’s good enough for me.

I’ve managed to sign myself up for several rather active classes from Zumba to Tabata without really knowing what it will entail. I ran it by the four year old who reassured me it all sounds like a good plan. “After all, Mummy, it doesn’t really matter what you do as long as you have fun and get to play.” Applying the imparted wisdom of a four year old I did the only thing I could that felt right: pour a glass of wine and make dinner plans with friends.

It's Like a Jungle Sometimes

2011-08-18T09:00:00.001-04:00

“It’s like a jungle sometimes. Makes me wonder how I keep from going under.” Grandmaster Flash had it right in the eighties. Every time I look out our French doors at our garden, it’s the refrain that runs through my head.

People who like boats might move closer to water. Avid skiers, closer to mountains. So based on our choice of home, you might think we are passionate master gardeners. Only you’d be wrong, and we’re not. We bought our house in December when its tiered gardens and glorious flowerbeds were shielded by a blanket of snow. We knew about them, of course. It had been a much-touted selling point. But perhaps we didn’t realize exactly how much we were biting off until the profligate spring growth left me feeling as impotent as a brush whacker on a Deep South chain gang.

I emailed the former owners to see if they had any words of advice or plans of attack. “Don’t worry,” they wrote, “It is overwhelming in the spring, but it’ll slow down.” The plus point was that someone had had the vision, or the cash-flow, to have all the flowerbeds painstakingly landscaped, perennials planted to ensure wave after wave of perpetual colour. After the spring daffodils, crocuses and tulips came the azaleas, then the bleeding hearts. An enormous swollen red stump became a huge rhubarb plant and tall stems wearing tier upon tier of grass skirts turned out to be deeply blazing Asiatic lilies.

The grass was another matter. American grass is different than any I’ve known, thicker, more determined, and always in need of a trim like some sort of mop-headed petulant teenager or a shag rug. And to be fair, our predecessors had been pretty gung-ho about lopping down trees and pushing back the woods, so thanks to them there’s a lot of lawn to mow. My husband saddles up in the zero-turn mower, offers a resigned wave, and steers into the horizon, a lone cowboy preparing to mow for three point five hours straight.

I caved and called a landscaping company for advice. Exactly how far out of our depth were we really? For starters, we didn’t actually know our plants from our weeds which accounts for why I was happily letting some crazy weeds grow three feet high waiting pointlessly for them to burst into bloom. The plants were providing a sort of slow-motion entertainment, mystery creatures rising from the ground. My husband urged me to weed out invasive grasses busting out of the fast-growing ground cover in beds around the house. But I waited and was rewarded when they turned out to be regal purple irises with bright yellow tongues. So they weren’t growing in an aesthetically ideal spot, but they’d worked hard to get there and who was I to yank them out? Meanwhile, we weren’t quite sure what to do with the flowers that had run their course and I lived in fear of decimating the gardens with the same aplomb with which I had unwittingly emptied the perennial beds at our old home.

The landscaper summed up our predicament. “Well,” she said, “Let me put it this way. What you have here is pretty spectacular. Someone really did his homework. But maintaining this could be one person’s full-time job.” I wasn’t surprised. In my ongoing correspondence with the former owners I had since learned that their in-laws, keen gardeners, lived with them and took responsibility for the bulk of the gardening. Oh, to be retired with a gardening habit rather than a harried mother of two, burning the midnight oil and occasionally running out of bread.

The landscaper agreed to my demands. They’d teach me what to do and I’d hire a co-weeder for two hours a week in the peak summer months to get things under control. I was working on the premise that information is more powerful than fear, and with due diligence - and a little help - I’d eventually tame the beast. Except then we went away. For two weeks. And while we enjoyed some Massachusetts sunshine, New York drank its own weight in rain. We returned to a jungle. The grass a foot high, some weeds reaching four feet. Grass cuttings sprouting in the flower-beds and the patio was awash with green.

I rolled up my sleeves, and started with the patio. I made the mistake of lamenting the wilderness encroachment to a friend, apparently an unsympathetic one, who told me to buckle down and get on with it. “Susie,” she said, “You might not have what you want, but if you try you might find have what you need.” And I suppose, with her clichéd nod to the Stones, she has a point. A rolling stone gathers no moss and it’s best to make hay while the sun shines. I’m already on it.

Is That "I Do" or "I Did"?

2011-08-11T09:00:00.000-04:00

No matter the dollars spent upfront or the massive US wedding industry calling the shots, when you waltz down the aisle there's a good chance your marital bliss could end in discord. What some report as a devastating trend, ruinous to family values (moral emphasis on values, not happiness), is encapsulated in the oft-touted divorce figure of 1 in 5 or its recently elevation to 2 in 5. Big hair, big dresses and big bands aside, there are an awful lot of big days gone awry. A quick snoop around eBay turns up enough wedding dresses – both second-hand and those that didn’t quite make it to the altar – to fill a David’s Bridal warehouse.

Frankly I’m surprised there isn’t a little more superstition surrounding that. A friend of mine completed the “something borrowed” tradition with a loaned wedding dress from a recently divorced friend. Sadly, it also brought her “something blue” when her marriage foundered in under a year.

Everyone from CNN to Vogue has over the past few years snorted and exhorted over the spiraling costs of the average US wedding (an estimate that ranges from $24,000-$40,000 depending on your source). More quietly, but thoughtfully armed with a big stick, the push toward marriage equality was gaining traction in the wings. (Mostly fueled by the noble pursuit of human rights rather than tulle or a wedding checklist on TheKnot.com.) The nattering naybobs vehemently opposing gay marriage envisioned the bill to be as virulently catastrophic to the sanctity of marriage as a medieval plague. Now, with its safe passage into law, the worrywarts should look on the bright side. Most of New York's first-into-the fray newlywed gays have been together longer than many heterosexual marriages last. At this rate they may quickly sway marriage statistics for the better. Family values rejoice!

I recently read that divorce parties are gaining in popularity, mostly in California where so many extraordinary trends take root. (We can thank sunny CA for Suzanne Somers’ Thigh Master and the Atkins diet, for starters.) Divorce parties themselves are, of course, not new. Divorce invitations and cakes (often complete with a livid cake topper bride trampling on her ex-) have entered the realm of availability although if I haven’t, so far, been invited to any actual parties. And now there’s a new breed in town. Company-run divorce parties, perhaps building on the success of so many clutter buster businesses and television shows, are hinged on an A-Z model, from initial consult to final sale. Sympathetic ladies in shining armour swoop into the divorcee’s home to help her to unclog her fabulous single self from the memory-provoking trappings of the marital home. The newly-ex keeps only the items that represent her true, future self and parts ways with the rest. Out with the old, in with the new.

Of course, since you’d have to be financially able to call them in in the first place, it stands to reason that the type of loot is something worth passing on. After the cathartic cleansing, the company arranges the party, a glorified private tent sale where people can snap up designer bargains. As it happens, there will be four winners: the buyers who pick up clothes, jewelry, and furniture for a fraction of their cost; the divorcee who makes some easy moolah, the divorce party company that takes a percentage and, wait for it, charities of choice. Yes, just to keep the karmic ball rolling in their favour, a designated percentage of the profits are earmarked for one or more charities. Take the actress, Kim Basinger, who sold her jewels and gave the profits to an animal shelter after divorcing Alec Baldwin. So what if it was one of the nastiest protracted celebrity divorces in recent memory? (Until Paul McCartney was taken to the cleaners by Heather Mills, that is.) At least we can rest assured that when one marriage fails another charity is counting its blessings.

All this hoopla over marital sanctity and divorce coagulated in my mind when my vacationing family exited the Oak Bluffs carousel. A comical tribe of young bachelorette partiers had been poured into their ‘LBD’s with mixed results, and were sporting the type of five inch heels more typically seen on drag queens. While we were stared, one pulled a Naomi, toppling from her stacked heels but saving her ankle from snapping in half at just the last minute. The bride-to-be was being helped along by an amorous male friend. I gave the marriage six months.

Don’t get me wrong. Bachelorette parties are by now as much a right of passage as the supposedly risqué, often tame by comparison, bachelor parties. With girls are dishing out the almighty dollar for male strippers, novelty straws and gummy worms shaped like body parts, I’m guessing the market, like the wedding industry, is only going to continue to grow. Luckily for me, with an October wedding looming, I’ve been invited to the bachelor party. Not because I’m any better friends with the groom, but simply because groom and groom are looking forward to making honest men of each other.

On Teeth and Stars

2011-08-04T09:00:00.003-04:00

Taking a break from the dramas of recent family vacations – last year’s summer rental house from hell, frequently uncooperative weather often culminating with our family being stranded in an airport/snowdrift/island ferry terminus (circle as appropriate), – this year we hedged our bets. We again went with a midsummer rental on Martha’s Vineyard during peak-season – but preceding the melee that typically accompanies up-island Presidential stays, (Chilmark being the preferred stop), although I needn’t have worried. Thanks to the debt deficit crisis Obama and family stayed home to enjoy the Washington air.

This year we were in the unusual position of renting the house where my husband spent his childhood summers. His Columbia County godparents, long ago co-owners of a summer home in Menemsha, both more recently deceased, had taken him there annually after his own father’s death. These trips simultaneously shielded him from the eternally unfolding weeks of boyhood summers and expanded his horizons with marathon rounds of I-Spy, morning hunts for pebble-smooth sea-glass, and lessons in bait and fishing off Dutcher’s dock.

Partly filmed at Dutcher’s Dock, “Jaws” was a pretty big deal in the 1980s, even when coolly received by the critics. Despite living some five thousand miles away, I recall similar memories of the film’s release (though I really only saw it after it reached television and my brother recorded it on our shiny Sony Betamax VCR): the shocking early scenes of a nubile, hippy girl rushing into the sea for a night swim before ending up as shark bait. The eerie tolling of the bell buoy, constant and haunting as the glassy waters returned to early morning tranquility, the girl’s inebriated boyfriend still lying oblivious and comatose on the beach. Now, sitting on our deck, some hundred yards from the dock, all I can hear is that 1980s clanging bell interspersed with the garden cicadas and bullfrogs that perpetually remind me I’m abroad. I think back to my early high school French exchanges in northern France and imagine what became of my pen pals. Nostalgia and the occasional ululating loon creep in.

I wonder if the bell buoy is maddening for those moored by the dock slips. I’m sure I wouldn’t sleep a wink. After all, the fishing boat decimated by Jaws in the movie’s final scenes was left just inside the harbour inlet for years, the picked-clean ribs of a trawler’s carcass projecting from the water’s edge. Clearly visible just ten years ago, it’s been slipping away. The island prefers to be remembered for its whaling history; no-one has capitalized on the shark theme, so rotted, stolen or submerged, this year the water has claimed the Orca II, now only preserved on film. For those boarding the bike ferry with or without such memories, there is nothing left to see.

The shingled house, named – tongue-in-cheek - ‘Footbuoy Manor’, proves a trove of memories. My husband strides around with our two and four year olds trailing him like ducklings while he lifts branches to touch a rock where he sat, aged five, looking over a small dam at the edge of the pond. They will sleep in the guest room where my husband once slept, though now the old pockmarked, popcorn ceiling has been smoothed over with plaster and paint. Albert and Ginny used to tell him he made the little divots in the sloped ceiling with his giant snores. He tells our children the same, but at least one is too wise to believe. And we seem to worry more these days. How close can they play to the pond? We douse them with water-proof, sweat-proof, toddler-proof SPF 70+ at the beach before clicking them into lollipop coloured life-vests, a far cry from the burnt feet, lobster shoulders and inflatable Li-Lo beds of beaches in the seventies.

There’s something in the act of re-living familiar scenes from your childhood. Visiting places so familiar they ought to have a scent to explain the evocative reactions. Like a dog-eared paperback you forgot but once read, faded postcards poked into the edge of a mirror, smiling faces recalling summer stays, ordinary days, and favourite spots, time spent in that carefree way reserved exclusively for childhood when your only concerns were your own explorations, discoveries, and getting home in time for dinner.

Sitting beneath a complexly star-dappled sky, one without clouds or light pollution, just constellations and the first of August’s shooting stars, we wonder what it would take to ever recreate the carefree exuberance of a childhood unfettered by grief, responsibility or greater concern. In the overwhelming space that blends nighttime with memory, interrupted only by bursts of salty air and the chiming bell, we share wistfulness wishing Albert and Ginny could be with us now, somehow knowing that we came back to continue the theme of those happy years. We sit sipping cocktails, watching the stars, talking about lives and plans, as they did at exactly our age, their young charges upstairs asleep in the same room where ours now doze.

Let's Go Dutch

2011-07-28T09:00:00.000-04:00

Last week I took my mountain bike to the DownTube, a local bike shop that repeatedly tops Metroland’s Best Of the Capital Region list, though I’m not sure they really have much competition. (Surely WalMart and Target aren’t giving them a run for their money?) The staff undoubtedly knows their stuff but still manages to be friendly to non-gearheads, so it was worth a shot. My bike has seen better days. Better years really, since it last saw action in 2001 when I suffered a pretty bad accident and hung up my proverbial cycling shorts. Since then it’s been languishing in various sheds, sometimes left out to rust in the rain, occasionally spiffed up for a one-off weekend ride. In recent years, I tried attaching a child seat to the back, but the added weight over the rear wheel proved too unwieldy and I ended up clipping it to my husband’s bike instead.

Last year, after vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard, we were so smitten with the bicycle trailer pods propelled by parent power around the island, we rushed out and bought one. Nothing like putting the cart before the horse. Our parent bikes still needed a tune up so we just made do by pushing the trailer pod with its handlebar and third wheel adapter kit. In effect, we’d managed to add a giant yellow double stroller to our collection and we made great loops of the neighbourhood on foot, the cycling part somehow left on the backburner.

Bike tune-ups are not a cheap affair. Worth it, if your ride is actually worth anything. By the time we’d tallied up new brake wires, gear changer, brake pads and the $70 basic package things were not looking good. When I phoned to confirm the bike seat and seat post were definitely M.I.A., the total bill for goods and labour jumped up to $186, outweighing the value of a decade old bike.

In for a penny, in for a pound, I brought my husband’s bike in. The helpful staff seemed relieved and beamed as they assured me his bike was worth thrice the value of mine even in it’s cobweb covered, slightly rusted condition. Sure, they’d be happy to remove the jammed on child’s seat for another $6. (No dummies working here.) Would I like to donate my bike, they wondered? They could hand it over to a charity that cannibalizes old bike parts to fix up bikes for inner-city kids. Deal.

With my husband’s bike on the mend, and the children’s bike trailer at the ready, I found myself thrown into the market for a new bike. It’s been years since I even looked into bikes. I remember my brother getting his brand new 10-speed racer in the eighties; I’d chosen a brand new Driving Miss Daisy bicycle with metallic paint and honeysuckle motif. In grad school, a boyfriend bought me a mountain bike. One he wanted back when we broke up, although it was ultimately stolen on the street. (The bike chain cut with some sort of heavy-duty cutters. Hopefully not wielded by the ex-.) The mountain bike missing its seat had been was a chain-store buy, one that let me wrack up a few scrapes and falls before delivering a major contusion which left a permanent divot in my shin.

In the bike shop, surrounded by cool bikes, shiny lycra clothing, helmets and accessories for true enthusiasts, I waivered and thought about going whole hog. For a minute, I thought I could see myself riding trails and hanging with pack of fearless riders. The staff was showing me the entry-level Trek 7000 hybrids that might be the perfect choice for a returning novice. But I could only find room in my heart for the Bones II bike rack and left.

Somewhere, deep in my subconscious, I knew what I wanted. Visions of Dutch cyclists danced in my head, with friends and partners dangling on front and rear bike racks, progeny clipped into child seats, and bountiful loaves and farm produce bursting from wicker baskets. New York may not quite as bike friendly as most European cities and Routes 66, 9&20, or 203 would prove challenging for major grocery runs, but I have seen at least one person transporting their dry cleaning in a bicycle pod, so that’s encouraging. Even if it can’t be my bread line, I can at least take advantage of the Ashuwillticook Corridor or head up the Corning Preserve.

I scoured the internet to find my perfect bike. And there they were – Dutch bikes galore. Republic Bikes let you custom colour all the parts, CB2 offers one fabulous style with bright yellow tires, and Public paints theirs with a bright retro look. My Dutch Bike may offer the most authentic Opa, Oma, and Fr8 versions, but with an import price tag to match. I decided to go bespoke but with my custom colours I’m not leaving anything to chance. Along with my Dutch style wicker basket and dynamo headlight, I’d better spring for traditional Dutch security, a huge ship-style bike chain, to keep this puppy under lock and key.

The Final Frontier: Camping

2011-07-21T09:00:00.004-04:00

Camping, even the variety undertaken by big softees like our now upstate-New York-selves, somehow feels ruggedly American. You can picture the scene: a tiny slice of frontier life, boiling coffee in billy cans over a crackling fire, chewing on dubiously char-grilled jerky like cowboys in every Western movie ever made. Give me a little Clint Eastwood or John Wayne and I’ll be out back in the wilderness, warding off bush snakes with a lasso around my knapsack and staring down coyotes. Despite my secret hankering to go on one of those city slicker cattle driving vacations, I’d be lucky to make it 24 hours. When was the last time you saw a vegetarian cowboy on the silver screen? I’d probably throw up if they skinned a snake.

The seriousness of our annual camping trip to the Adirondack wilderness, a.k.a glorious northern Lake George, is undermined by the fact we rent a motorboat to reach the campsite. And when we alight at our freshwater island paradise, priority number one is unpacking the heavily iced coolers and setting up a pop up party tent with wraparound mosquito nets. Oh, the shame. We do sleep in tents and brave the shed-like latrines, (kindly erected over fly-ridden pits by the Lake George rangers), but this is not the camping of our forefathers. It’s not even the camping of my early teens when I was bumbling about the British countryside earning my orienteering and survival wings for a Duke of Edinburgh Award. These islands, with neither deer nor dogs, don’t even have ticks.

What they do have are raccoons. Each night I’d hear the stealthy shuffling as they attempted to open coolers or snag the trash bags hanging out of reach in a tree. Their delicate dexterous fingers may be admired for the type of pilfering talent commonly found among nineteenth century grifters, but I was more impressed with their paper shredding skills. We awoke on more than one morning, the campsite looking every inch like the aftermath of a debauched frat party, even the port-a-loo partially wrapped in shredded loo paper and the firepit awash with bottles and confetti.

I proudly toured the island with the two and four year olds naming plants and trees like a pro, (rather than a recent recipient of a one hour immersion course courtesy of a helpful landscape gardener.) Unfortunately, my purpose in pointing out the poison sumac trees to be avoided at all cost seriously backfired. The four year old obsessed about it, repeatedly dragging me over to identify it by its jagged leaves and invent increasingly terrifying tales. The two year old raised the stakes by obsessing over it in his own way, reappearing at base camp with a few lightly chewed leaves in his mouth.

As with all family holidays, it takes a day or two to shift gears. Fifty weeks of the year, the lake is a tranquil scene of seasonal beauty but the first two weeks of July could be renamed Jockfest. Throaty powerboats tear up and down the lake proving their virility. Sunburned captains are too busy watching thong clad groupies in the cockpit to pay attention to smaller craft and buoys. A yellow and red powerboat moored just off our island as we sat down to dinner, its music blaring, driver decked out in bling, and his two girlfriends either suffering simultaneous seizures or engaged in a buttock-shaking competition while Rihanna sang about her love for S&M. It didn’t take long for me to climb down the rocks and hail them, or for them to pull anchor and drive off.

When another powerboat buzzed us as we gently pulled away from our stationary dock, the driver and I locked eyes before throwing up our arms like a pair of angry stag beetles. He yelled epithets about us being crazy and I gave it right back like a card-carrying New Yawker, waving around my arms to illustrate his options in, let’s see, utilizing the rest of the lake.

The homeward leg of these trips is always a classic scene of bathroom stops and proclamations of desperate thirst and hunger as though the satisfaction of one need must be wholly divorced from the other and only voiced five miles further down the road. But we’d managed without mobile phones or Target for more than four days, perfected marshmallow roasting skills and proved hunting for fairy homes and making lavender-scented fairy baths out of acorn cups was infinitely more fun than Noggin.

We arrived home to an extraordinary patio invasion of Ground Digger Wasps, only slightly bigger than green hornets at over two inches long. My husband abandoned the British Open to procure the right weaponry. Women, children, and dog were barricaded in. For now, frontier life would live on.

Every parade needs a gorilla

2011-07-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

On July fourth, I’m almost always asked how long I have lived in the states. And as the years have racked up – somehow I’ve reached fifteen years stateside already – the reaction has slowly changed from interest in why I’m here to a simple bestowing of acceptance. “Fifteen years? You’re practically an American,” is a common retort. Time, rather than citizenship papers, is the great arbiter of assimilation stateside.

Now as a full-time resident, parent to two American-born children, I’m far from graduate school days avoiding amped-up geezer boys in downtown bars yelling rude epithets about the British. In short, I don’t have to make up great excuses to avoid the celebratory pageantry. Instead, I’ve now fallen hook, line and sinker, working diligently on Independence craft projects, decorating the children’s Radio Flyer wagon to join in the classic Old Chatham parade. The fourth may not technically be my national holiday, but the morning parade – and its nod to all things good about America - is intrinsic to our own family tradition. We wave flags, wear red, white, and blue, and don Uncle Sam hats. This year I even succumbed to sporting a festive USA headband. Fearing I may have gone too far, I stashed a Union Jack umbrella as protective talisman under a blanket in the back of the wagon, and tried to convince the parade queen (a fellow ex-pat), that we could be insurgents. At any rate, if it rained my true colours would be on display.

After living here for fifteen years you might imagine assimilation would be complete. After all, it only took Madonna about six months of living in London to start talking with a British accent. But no matter how long I’m here, there are always things that will pop up and smack me in the face as reminder that I’m living abroad. I can honestly say I never gave lorries a second thought in the UK, but over here I feel as passionately about flat-nosed American Mack trucks as my two-year old son. When I point them out and yell “Truck! Truck!” it’s only partly for his viewing pleasure. The rest is purely visceral. Another reminder, one among the more peculiar, is the moment I try to pull out of my drive onto a car-less road. Without any other vehicles for reference, parked or otherwise, it can take a few bewildering seconds while I work out which side I’m going to drive on.

At the epicenter of my American life is the humble bagel. My entire stay in the states could be dished up and served on one. From an student years to lost loves and career moves, I’ve always had a favourite bagel place ready to mop up the tears or break bread in celebration. Despite being readily available in British supermarkets nowadays, I don’t know anyone who actually buys them other than in a vague attempt to recapture the magic after a weekend trip to New York. Give me any year in the past fifteen and I can tell you where I was living, what was going on in my life, and my daily bagel order. If that doesn’t make me a quasi-American I don’t know what does. Take 1997, for example. Working in the NYC Mayor’s Office and ordering hot buttered cinnamon and raisin morning bagels from a Manhattan street vendor parked on Center Street. How about 1999? Running a program for young offenders, living with my German best friend in an apartment complex, and living on sesame bagels with lox and cream cheese. I was in love for much of the 2000s, mostly with a sun-dried tomato bagel sandwich I’d invented at the upstate Brueggers Bagels chain, while working on research projects for the feds.

I love it when my borrowed American traditions throw me a curve ball. Just as I think I’ve tried every bagel in the shop, someone has the bright idea to make a square one. News this past weekend that H&H Bagels, a long-standing bagel bastion of the Upper West Side, and one of my favourite leisurely weekend haunts, has shuttered its doors. This week the Old Chatham Parade readied itself for a traditional start -- fire engines and classic cars jockeying for position, small children dressed in revolutionary garb, hunt club beagles braying, tractors, ATVs and Radio Flyer wagons all tarted up to the nines in sparkly spangled banners, flag carrying WWII vets in the lead, and neighbours hosting 8am champagne and bloody mary breakfast. And as I revelled in the familiar scene, a gorilla showed up. Not any gorilla, but one to accompany the parade queen in the back of an open top Mustang. To be honest, no-one even batted an eyelid, the extraordinary being a quintessential part of American tradition after all. We marched, and sang, and then stopped in the country store for a toasted bagel.

Carpe Noctem! (Seize the Night!)

2011-06-30T09:00:00.000-04:00

A few days ago I picked up a bracelet in a big box store. Nothing fancy, just a strand of pink beads on knotted twine, but it was the attached card that caught my eye. It featured a single word in bold print: Focus. The fact that I was so easily distracted by a shiny display of hopeful, new age-y sentiment was a clear indication I was lacking in the focus department. No doubt it was exactly the sort of slack-jawed, magpie reaction the product placement gurus were hoping for.

The bracelets might just have easily been for sale at a school fair, lovingly knotted by a ten-year old hippie jewellery entrepreneur fighting against the traditional bake sale machine. But here, in iridescent colours, pinned to simple cards promising Wisdom, Courage, or Good Health to the wearer, they were pretty enticing. Two lines of smaller print afforded some serene observations about clarity and focus. Had they added a third line it could have been passably decent haiku. I decided, having resisted the urge to get a Carpe Diem tattoo fifteen years ago, the bracelet may not magnetically draw focus to me, but it could be a useful daily reminder. Into the shopping cart it went along with the baby wipes, shower gel and laundry detergent. My immediate future would be focused and clean.

At the checkout, the cashier chatted while I unloaded all the bulky shopping onto the conveyer belt and off again into bags. That is, everything except the bracelet surely energetically radiating its vibes of clarity and focus. The cashier liked the humorous greeting card I was buying, stopping to open and read the punch line inside, which struck me as vaguely intrusive since it could have been one of the ones with a crude one-liner. Then we would both have felt awkward. I left the store with my shopping, the pink focus beads loose in the cart. Had I known they were there, it would have been theft, but, blissfully ignorant, I just gave the cart a hefty shove into the trolley rack and drove off.

I remembered the beads a good ten minutes later. I hadn’t bought them, bagged them, or even plucked them from a corner of the trolley, so now I faced a dilemma. Assuming they were still there, should I drive back to the car park, attempt to find the cart and return the bracelet to the store? Or forget about it, secure in the knowledge no willful crime had occurred? Perhaps another shopper would discover the bracelet and be more receptive to its focusing powers than I. Pondering its fate, I contented myself with the thought the cart stackers would find it, and promptly missed my next exit.

My lack of focus is directly tied in with our current effort to relieve our 4 year old of her overnight diapers. Summer arrived, school ended, and we were apparently so afraid of relaxation and an under-committed schedule that we moved straight into absolving our 2 year old of his pacifier, activating potty training, and tackling the nightly bed heists (where one or the other parent is held hostage) head on. What would one more bedtime challenge add to the mix?

As parents, you really do have to psych yourself up to end overnight diapers. Even when the accident odds are down to one in seven, the overnight diaper is simple insurance, and a general promise of uninterrupted sleep. Taking the plunge, the rubber under-sheet goes on the bed, the choice of pyjamas to be worn commando is celebrated, and praise for dry nights doled out in spades. We understand accidents might still happen, you reassure. So the nocturnal arrival of a small child by your bed poking you to report an accident wrenches you from R.E.M. sleep into instant action, hands moving like a ninja clock as you reach in all the wrong directions for clean sheets and clothes.

Unfortunately, when you wake up at 4a.m., the same small person curled up beside you bleating that she has wet the bed, your brain momentarily splits in half. One side is still reassuring the child in soothing tones and taking charge. The other half is assessing the situation and internally broadcasting panicked observations, “She’s in our bed! There’s no rubber cover! One side of my pajamas is soaking wet! Strip yourself! Strip the bed! Strip the weird fuzzy cover on the memory foam mattress!”

Luckily your children will be on hand to witness your gradual mental meltdown. They will leap out of bed at the sound of birdsong and wonder why you’re spooning sugar into the coffee machine, mixing up their names, and feeding the dog twice. If it only takes a few hazy, interrupted nights of pre-dawn baths and stripped beds to render a mass-produced pink bracelet an alluring amulet, it might only be weeks before I mistake pink flamingo lawn ornaments for lucky talisman. Time to focus on the task in hand: Carpe Noctem!

Olympic Hopeful

2011-06-23T09:00:00.000-04:00

The newspapers are picking it apart daily with analysis and opinion polls, while Lord Coe, Chair of the London Olympics Organizing Committee, (Sebastian to those of us who remember him as an eighties Olympic champion), has been forced to defend the ticket allocation process for the London 2012 Olympics. Fairness and logic have been called into question and, to be fair, it has been a funny old way of doing business. I’m no mathematician but with twenty million tickets up for grabs, and 1.9 million applicants, you’d think there would have been plenty for all. And if you’d read an initial estimate of a 250,000 unlucky applicants, that paltry figure has been revised as closer to 1 million.

I signed up on the UK 2012 Olympic ticketing website in March 2010, determined my husband and I should celebrate our joint fortieth birthdays on home turf at the London Olympics. The only snag, as I saw it, was getting my hands on tickets. After registration, came the first pep-talk email: Usain Bolt wants to be there - and we want you to be there too! By registering your interest in London 2012 ticketing you have taken the first step on your ticketing journey to 2012.You are now in the best position to find out when tickets will go on sale and how you will be able to apply for them.

Over the course of a year, enthusiastic outbursts would appear in my inbox, usually accompanied by one or more exclamation points. In May: Ten million tickets for the Olympic and Paralympic Games will go on sale in 2011, of which 75 per cent will be available directly to the public via a fair ballot process! In June: All venues are now in place for the London 2012 Games, as the final Football venue has been confirmed! In November: Ticket applications for the London 2012 Olympic Games will open in March 2011! In December, real news without excitable grammar: The application window will be open for a set period of time, after which all applications will be considered equally. Tickets will not be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis so there is no advantage to submitting your application on the first day. This is your best chance to get the tickets you want so take your time and plan your application before submitting.

By March 2011, the email blasts began to get pretty excited: The wait is almost over! Applications for London 2012 Olympic Games tickets open in just eight days’ time on Tuesday 15 March! Apply for your Olympics tickets now! You registered your interest in Olympic Games tickets. Now is the time to act! In the summer of 2012 the superstars of world sport are coming to the UK. Now is your best chance to be able to say ‘I was there’. This is your best chance to get the tickets you want and be a part of the greatest show on earth! Remember applications are open for a limited time only. (You can practically hear the last line being read at great speed like a legal disclaimer.)

Fourteen months on, we finally submitted our application, and received confirmation: This email is from the London 2012 Ticketing team, confirming that your ticket application has been received. I practically rubbed my hands with glee. As days turned to weeks, I discovered the bigger question was, in the immortal words of Whitney Houston, “How will I know?” All the monthly, sometimes weekly, email blasts egging me on during the pre-application wait stopped cold turkey and I found the post-application wait almost unbearable. Email updates assured us we’d know by May. Payment would be taken between May 10 and June 10. No, just on May 16th. Actually, almost all transactions will be taken by May 31st. The newspapers practically crowed that if you hadn’t had money debited from your account by May 31st you were among the unlucky. The ticketing website countered some transactions might still go through right up until June 10th. When both June 1st and 10th arrived without email, fanfare or a debit transaction, I considered it game over.

So, who had been successful? Tales were rehashed in the media like the man who hedged his bets by applying for $58,000 worth of tickets and received, by the committee’s grace and glory, some $17,000 worth of seats - and had to go cap in hand to his bank to increase his credit limit. Two others successfully secured tickets to the popular men’s 100m final after applying for only that one event. As the madding crowd called foul, the organizing committee came up with strategies for 2nd and 3rd shots at the remaining tickets. (Why, exactly, there would be any unallocated tickets at this time, I’m not sure.) No doubt the brains that dreamt up the oddly complicated approach – albeit in an admirable pursuit of fairness and equality - are wishing they’d stuck to the basics. Suddenly, first come, first served, with a cap on the total number of per person tickets looks pretty reasonable.

This week, I nearly choked on a new London 2012 Ticketing email: Congratulations! We are delighted to confirm that you have been allocated some or all of the London 2012 Olympic Games tickets you applied for. You have been charged only for the tickets you have been allocated. We will be in touch prior to 24 June 2011 to confirm the details of which tickets you have been allocated.

There hasn’t been a debit charge posted to my bank account as yet, but I remain steadfastly an Olympic hopeful.

Soggy summer break, anyone?

2011-06-16T09:00:00.000-04:00

It should be no surprise that I would manage to drive five hours to Cape Cod, with two small children and two grandparents confined in the car, on a day of glorious sunshine. The Littles accepted the torture with promises of the seaside, seashells, and sandcastles, and the mini screens in the back of the driver and passenger seats confirmed television’s undeniable status as the babysitter/drug of the nation. As long as the thematically chosen Little Mermaid or Finding Nemo was playing, there wasn’t a peep or complaint. Shower me with scorn if you must, but the remaining three adults in the car were spared at least four and a half hours of “Are we there yet?”

We arrived to clouds rolling in and my mobile bleeping text warnings of an imminent and virulent storm. By the time we sat down to dinner in the ever-lovely Chatham Bars Inn, a lightning storm was cracking the sky and thundering overhead while golf ball sized hail pummeled our parked car. A couple of teasing electrical surges dimmed the lights and then the power went out, apparently the first time in the memory of any staff who had worked there longer than a season, and to the consternation of new foreign exchange recruits.

Four days on the Cape, and three of them mostly soaked. When the rain died down to a light drizzle we donned kagools and sweatshirts to search for seashells on the blustery beach. Pre-trip I’d managed to come down with a little sinus infection so I curled up on a beach chair popping antibiotics and swaddling myself in half a dozen complimentary beach towels. Miraculously, the same children that can moan about blah weather days at home were steadfastly impervious to the cold, content to paddle in the choppy breaking waves and turn out a production line of sandcastles attractively pockmarked by the rain.

Since the entire vacationing population had been ejected from the beach and pool, (or vain attempts to lounge in the five minute bursts of sun), they ventured en masse into town. Business was hopping, with no sign of a recession. As wet jackets jostled in doorways, wallets were opening faster than Littlenecks at a clambake and the perpetual cha-ching of cash registers was, much like the shop owners’ faces, full of festive joy. We bought a small toy mermaid on the heels of another family buying three. Adding two sweaters and two sweatshirts to my final tally, the shop owner beamed at me and couldn’t help but exclaim how well they were doing that day. Clearly when it rains in a beach town, a little retail therapy goes a long way.

Let’s face it, the weather has been - for lack of a better word - wacked. Brits love to talk about the weather. It’s a conversation starter and, who knows, it might even provide stress relief. Our collective memory of seasonal weather is a necessary barometer against which the average day can be measured. Living abroad, Brits swiftly create new weather memory banks to join in marveling at unusually heavy snowfalls in late April or balmy Indian summer temperatures in September. So all this atypical weather is causing no end of angst. It’s the second time we’ve lured my parents out for a summer visit with promises of warm weather, and while they are being soaked in New England, old England is facing a drought; Springfield, Mass., is recovering from a tornado, and we’re baffled by the peculiar sight of simultaneous chunky hail, forked lightning and a sun-soaked rainbow. Suddenly whatever we think the weather should be doing, it isn’t, and making plans based on weather predictions is about as futile as asking a three-year old to estimate his mood a week in advance.

We tried Provincetown to lift soggy spirits but small children don’t want to shop (although they do want to eat ice-cream in the rain) and we nearly froze to death visiting the artisans’ shops on the windy pier. Luckily, Provincetown is not only known for art galleries and fabulous revue shows, it also sells a mean Godiva hot chocolate that warmed us up after buying wet weather jackets from the t-shirt shops flogging ponchos and cheap umbrellas. Everyone has a threshold, and like the dogged English sitting fully clothed on chilly pebble beaches, we’d given it our best shot. After I was woken in the night by hammering rain, I packed our bags. We ate a final Cape Cod breakfast and we hit the road. In the torrential rain.

Facing Down Disappointment over Sports Day

2011-06-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

Surely nothing spells summer and the end of the long school year than Sports Day: the smell of freshly cut grass, painted chalk lines, and string barriers holding back cheering parents and children. Little children compete in egg and spoon races, hobble along in three-legged competitions, and shriek as they hop along for the sack races. Parents are not spared and compete in parent-child races or 500 metre heats. Who can forget the sight of Princess Diana hitching up her eighties mid-calf denim skirt and racing against the other mums at her boys’ sports day? It’s ritual and rite of passage. In the UK, that is.

At the end of Pre-K3, my daughter’s first year in a real school setting, (albeit part-time pre-school), I waited eagerly for the announcement of Sports Day. Sure enough, news of Field Day, as it’s known over here, came along but only for Pre-K4 through 8th grade. I’d have to wait. This year, with the grandparents visiting from England, I pumped and primed the whole family to expect a whole day of fun at school, races, games and an ice-cream sundae table thrown in for good measure. I checked with other class mums. Would I see them at Field Day on Tuesday? They looked at me quizzically. “I don’t think so,” said one mother, “It’s usually just for the kids.” But I was emphatic in my certitude. “But the whole school will be participating! I’m sure all the parents will be there. I’m bringing my son, my husband is trying to get out of work early, and I’ve invited both sets of grandparents. See you there!”

At pick-up the day before, I collared a teacher over our expected arrival time. She looked puzzled and assured me it was really just for the children. “Don’t you have races?” I asked. “It’s mostly team games, lots of water fun, and a bouncy castle. But parents don’t come. I mean you could… but you’d be the only ones.” She didn’t categorically tell me not to come but I understood we’d be Norman No-friends if we did. And frankly nothing embarrasses a child more than its mother waving, “Yoo-hoo, sweetie! Coo-eee, it’s Mummy!” from the sidelines of any sporting event, let alone one to which the ’rents aren’t actually invited.

I was pretty crushed about this news. Could it really be that my long-awaited dream of attending my children’s Sports Days would never happen? I mean, ever? Living in the states would make it so. All those re-runs of Peppa Pig’s Sports Day priming my young for the fun and sportsmanship of Sports Day were all for nought. Dashed were my projected memories of rolling around in great piles of grass cuttings, having massive allergy attacks, and screaming “Bundle!” as we all piled on top of one another in a scrum. Could it be political correctness had gone awry in the school system where competitive races were to be discouraged? Or maybe parents had become too feisty, belligerent even, in shouting encouragement to their progeny and disparaging remarks to their classmates. Every year there seems to be at least one news story of some ghastly parental altercation at a football/hockey/baseball game. And in 2005, British magazine, Country Life, reported many UK schools had banned the “mothers and fathers” races due to fighting and cheating. Nice.

Perhaps I’m looking back at those pre-noughtie years with misplaced nostalgia, remembering when racing heats were fun and relay races depended on team spirit, before every childhood accolade was instant fodder for the academic résumé. The school lacrosse team might play a short scrimmage, and the gym team might do a demonstration of back flips and tumbles. (Of course, there was the summer of ’79 when half the elementary school gym team suffered first-degree burns on their feet after dancing on black rubber gym mats in the midday sun. But that was just a blip on the summer landscape.) Sports Day always ushered in the summer with a literal bang of the starting gun.

Not one to be deterred, I’ve decided to bring a slice of the motherland to upstate New York with a little impromptu Sports Day at our house. Egg and spoon races, sack races, mother/father races, a friendly little round of croquet will prevail! Let’s just hope it doesn’t end Eliza Doolittle style, with one of the excited mums yelling, “Come on little Jimmy, move your bleedin’ @#$%!”

Who Broke the Daddy Cup?

2011-06-02T09:00:00.000-04:00

There are many cups of accomplishment out there in the world: the Ryder Cup, the Whitbread Cup, the Wimbledon Cup, and the Daddy Cup. The last easily blows the others out of the water for the sheer amount of manufacturing time required to achieve its unique appearance, and the determination taken to see it through. Other Cups are simply melded, engraved, or tapped into shape by jewelers and silversmiths proud of their craft, but the Daddy Cup is born of blood, sweat and tears: those of a determined mother and the creative outpourings of their progeny. The Daddy recipient will be overjoyed and vow to drink his coffee out of it daily. It will be revered, carefully handled, and given first class status as “top-rack only” in the dishwasher.

If you’ve ever asked anyone to come over, whether that’s been to stay for a few days, housesit, pet sit, babysit, or service an appliance, you know the laws of probability race to your house and divide exponentially. At the top of the probability tree, is the increased chance of accidents, like putting bleach in the washing machine fabric softener compartment; throwing your gentle-wash, coldwater, line-dry laundry into the dryer on super hot speed dry; running the garbage disposal with two forks, a penny and some identifiable plastic wreckage inside; or knocking over a decorative porcelain candlestick with the window shade. We returned from our recent getaway to all this and more, but one mystery remains: Who broke the Daddy Cup?

The Daddy Cup required a car journey to a Paint-Your-Own-Pottery shop wherein the accompanying small children were required to select the appropriate chalice to paint, while not touching or bumping into any of the china on display or on the drying rack after artistic renderings by others. This is stressful for the accompanying parent, mostly since she is required to absorb a decent amount of information about the price per child, per minute, per additional paint colour, per extra (like stickers, string, and specialty raised or puffy paint), all while herding the inquisitive smalls away from the $45 mug and plate combo to the plain $12.99 mug special. The children must choose their first five colours from a board of about 75. Anyone who has ever presented a child under five years old with more than two options knows this level of choice can only result in total indecision and a mental breakdown. Once wrapped in painting smocks and seated, they are presented with an open bowl of water and sponges to wet the mug. Again, encouraging children to “have at it” with a large bowl of water, can really only end up one way. Our table was so sloshed we had to be reseated.

Despite obvious parallels between preschoolers and tiny baby bulls in a china shop, once seated, they will not be hurried when it comes to paint. Art cannot be rushed. As the minutes ticked by and the bill racked up, I found myself jumping in with, “Let me help you with that, it might be quicker…”- much to their fury and the shop assistants’ smirks. Two hours later, two children, three fights over paint colours, two art tables, the addition of one ready-to-paint unicorn, and suddenly the $12 special was closing in on $56 before tax. I offered to write BEST DADDY on the front (special puffy paint, $4 extra) and we called it a wrap. Arguably, it had been a meaningful special mother-child activity, surely worth every penny, although one of our handprint collages slapped together at the kitchen table might have been just as effective, and free. But surely a more meaningful gift could not be found for the time invested, the handmade artistry, the arguments, compromises and pouts shared over the craft? In short, the Daddy Cup is utterly irreplaceable.

A couple of days after our return, my heart sank when I saw a long crack inside the Daddy Cup. On closer inspection, the crack was only the tip of the iceberg. The entire mug had been painstakingly glued back together after a clearly catastrophic accident that left the mug halved and the handle shattered into several pieces. Everything had been carefully retrieved and reassembled, no doubt with a good deal of super glue, and positioned back in the cupboard among its brethren of inferiors. I was gobsmacked, not by the accident itself since I am no stranger to breakages, but by the level of intrigue and complicity. Someone – bearing in mind there were only a handful of trusted souls in and out of our house – was so appalled at what had been broken that they preferred an artistic invisibility cloak rather than leave it out with a note. I’m pretty sure the Real Madrid player who dropped his team’s trophy over the edge of the victory bus would have done the same thing if he could, but then he was object of derision in a nation of ardent fans. Nonetheless, the accidents involving the candlestick and the melted egg timer have been claimed, but no-one has brought the restructured mug to our attention (nor do we have the heart to pry), leaving us to forever wonder, “Who dunnit?”

Savour the Whine

2011-05-23T23:47:00.000-04:00

While we’ve been peering out at the pouring rain and wondering when we’ll get a break to mow the lawn and tackle the jungle thriving on mild temperatures and incessant downpours, film stars have been tromping the sun-drenched pavement of the Cannes Film Festival, and the rest of Europe has washed up on UK beaches. Monday marked the hottest day of the year yet with temperatures reaching almost ninety degrees Fahrenheit. Media images of Brighton beach awash with pasty sunbathers were reminiscent of the French Riviera circa 1970 or a cartoon rendition of a crowded Italian beach in a ‘Where’s Waldo’ book. The only thing slightly more comical than beachgoers lying cheek-to-cheek, is the sight of Russians flocking to the Baltic beaches to stand – yes, stand - in the sun. Having only seen this in photos, I’ve always wondered whether it’s a peculiarly silent sun worship or whether the usual beach hubbub goes on. (Then my mind inexplicably wanders off into a reverie where, at the sound of a whistle, they all shimmy forward like lemmings to the sea.)

Accompanying news that England has had barely a drop of rain since the first week of April, are predictions of an old-fashioned hose-pipe ban and a long, hot summer. Apparently, any rainfall they lack is instead falling on the bright green grass of the Berkshire hills and Hudson River pastures. Perhaps the unexpected beneficiary of these balmy weeks in England and Wales is the British wine industry, which - no longer an oxymoron - is flourishing. Fights over global warming versus climate change are no odds to the thriving vines. Having all but decimated the country’s richly diverse apple orchards – (land developers and financially-strapped councils can be so egregiously short-sighted) - it’s a thing of beauty to see acres of vineyards bearing fruit in the traditionally hoppy beer territory of Kent and elsewhere from Yorkshire to Dorset, and Cornwall to Wales.

While the seasides of south and west Britain report a rush on ice cream (and hopefully cockles too), the supermarkets are predicting unusual spring figures for burger, beer, and barbecue sales. Must be the grilling fever that grips upstate New Yorkers, freed from the months of frozen tundra, the minute Mother’s Day and Albany’s Tulip Fest is over. (Notoriously the wettest weekend of spring.) Diehard grilling friends are giving a two-finger salute to the soggy weather, with a streak of doggedly English determination. The burger must go on!

Finally, the English Riviera, a stunning stretch of South Devon coastline and harbours, is having its moment in the sun, rivaling its more southerly competition with temperatures outstripping Athens, Rhodes, and Rome. And while the UK is making hay and crushing grapes, I’ve stopped whining about pseudo-tropical rains in favour of trying out new wines. This week, in an unrelated incident I should add, I severed the fleshy pad of a finger on the kitchen mandolin (purchased at Valatie’s ‘Great Finds’, if you want your own). After regaining consciousness, I commiserated with a tasty little pinot noir, only to remember alcohol’s blood-thinning properties and consider the agony of elevating my arm for hours, like riding the subway during rush hour.

Playing Jack and the Beanstalk with my four year old, she laid out the ground rules: “Let’s pretend we’re really hungry like Jack and his mother. There’s no food in the cupboard, no money to go to the supermarket, and nothing in the fridge. No, wait, let’s make it worse. Let’s pretend it’s so bad we don’t have any wine. You open the ‘fridge and there’s no food and no wine at all. Ready?” You can’t really argue with logic like that. But, just in case, I mentally checked the box that I’m not a mummy blogger serving up wine at rainy morning play-dates or drinking pinot noir out of a sippy cup.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting on the climate change heating up Chicago, and its strategic fifty-year adaptation plan based on the news that Chicago will “feel more like Baton Rouge than a Northern metropolis by the end of this century.” Unusually rainy springs will give way to long, dry summers and a shift of several zones for plant hardiness and drought tolerance. As Chicago gets its game plan in place, New York is devising its own adaptation plan to meet the rising sea. So, who knows, perhaps this spring’s torrential rains are a prediction for future, Riviera-style, hot summers and a boon for the New York wine industry. Watch out California, here we come.

**If you fancy learning more about English wine, conveniently English Wine Week runs May 28th – June 5th, 2011: http://www.englishwineweek.co.uk/ **

A Comped Trip and Other Animals

2011-05-19T09:00:00.001-04:00

I now know the beauty in accompanying a spouse on a corporate business trip lies in how little is expected of you. You’re along for the ride, without responsibility to schmooze, power lunch, or strike deals on a handshake. In fact, it’s such a far cry from any other normal scenario that it takes a while to feel comfortable abdicating all controls to those in charge. But abdicate you must, feeling rather like a driving instructor letting a first-time driver take the wheel.

The Texan trip coordinators possessed complementary matching names of Misty and Mandy, like a pair of television hosts. Stripped of any expectation that we may be capable of managing our room accounts, we’re provided with blue wristbands to distinctively identify us as part of one Borg-like collective. The corporate colleagues, blown in like tumbleweeds from west to east, slap shoulders, down drinks and compare sales and fish catch. Spouses exchange names and compare iPhone pictures of Jimmy Jr and Isabella left at home in Houston, Tampa and Santa Barbara.

Comp-ed an island weekend getaway on someone else’s dime, ten years senior to the hard-partying management group, and lacking any corporate obligation, I decided to drift between novel protagonists. I aspired to be an Ernest Hemingway character wiling away time on a deserted beach. Instead, by night, I found myself Carrie Bradshaw, shod in beloved stilettos normally catching dust in upstate New York (for the record, sand, cocktails and stilettos don’t mix), watching the guests wrestling over free sunglasses and Mont Blanc pens with the same zeal you might witness among brides at a Vera Wang trunk sale. And by day, I morphed into a veritable Gerald Durrell chasing lightening fast geckos and manhandling hermit crabs the size of my fist.

For the inexperienced, wild iguanas can be intimidating at a few feet long with their dinosaur faces, spiked ridge-backs and snaking tails, but I soon learned their real weakness is French fries. The staff laughed as I nervously offered lettuce leaves to placate one iguana intent on climbing onto my sun-lounger. “He doesn’t want your lettuce, he wants your fries,” they said, and soon the iguana and I were working on a double act. I paid him the going rate of at least fifteen fries for his trouble. In my new confidence as something of an iguana-whisperer, I started trying to pet any iguana that stumbled into view until an anxious hotel staffer interrupted my daring efforts with a warning that it could bite or smack me – hard - with its tail. The fact that noone had thought to offer similarly sage advice while I was hand-feeding another was not lost on me. Perhaps they were hoping for a scene.

Boarding a local taxi - arguably a brightly-painted haycart with bench seats - I almost sat down on a huge black centipede. My first thought, mostly based on a scene out of Platoon rather than experience or biology, was that it was a huge leach. Our crusty old taxi driver just laughed, telling me “it’s just a black worm”. Had it been a centipede, he added, it would have stung me. Well, that was reassuring. When I told him centipedes in the UK don’t reach such mammoth proportions, let alone sting, it set him off on a tear about the British monarchy and the Queen’s 1959 post-coronation visit which swiftly unraveled into a tirade about his father’s seventeen children, unforgiveable adultery (as though there is another kind), and his two wives, before dog-legging back to Prince William’s recent wedding. All this emanating from a comment about a multi-legged, six-inch armoured black worm, and all taking place during perilously steep hairpin turns at a life-threatening speed. I wondered where the conversation would have gone had I asked him about the resort-tamed iguanas.

On a hike to reach the crystal waters of an unspoiled beach, our guide suddenly pushed us ahead of her up some steep paths. The afternoon rains, it turned out, often bring out snakes of which she’s deathly afraid. I drew comfort from the fact that she still leads hikes at all, although I wasn’t prepared for the overhead assault of crabs launching themselves off rocks into the sea. At sea level, flopping our way sideways into the water in snorkel and flippers, we sidestepped over the black sea urchins peppering the shallow waters like landmines. As I peered at every rock I found red urchins, subsequently identified as fire urchins for their skill at inflicting discomfort. Then I spotted the white ones which seemed to unfairly skew the odds.

With all this time to observe nature, I took note of the corporate wildlife back at the pool and a visible pecking order among the sunning guests. Without titles or corner offices for reference, you could still identify the VPs by the sheer volume of traffic circulating around them. That, and they were the ones signing off on the hefty lunchtime bar tabs. I was reminded of Ralph and Jack in Lord of the Flies, and wondered how long we’d need to be castaway on the island before factions formed under these transplanted VPs, one with a penchant for civilized order and the other hungry for the hunt. In the wild world of sales, I’m guessing both have their place.

When you can't even blame Friday 13th

2011-05-12T09:00:00.001-04:00

There are days that start with a bang and get progressively worse. Today, 6:30am and the fleet of backhoes, steamrollers and stern-faced men processing up our drive was the pistol start catapulting us from sleep, into the nearest pile of clothes, and out to move our cars before they became part of the asphalt. In our excitement, we forgot to let the dog out and he, in his excitement, let us know his disappointment by emptying his bladder and bowels by the mudroom door.

The high-pitched whining of the dishwasher only caught my attention after I had resolved the first debacle, but having whined like this through the night - without actually bothering to wash the dishes - it soon let us know its thoughts by juddering and grinding to a halt. In resigning itself to appliance redundancy, the sleek Bosch dishwasher joined the extremely handsome Viking refrigerator as a shiny hood ornament in my kitchen. After three unsuccessful attempts by supposedly credentialed refrigerator repairmen , we asked them to bring us a temporary spare while they ordered even more new parts and figured out a viable game plan. Nearly a month on and I have become so comfortable with having to retrieve items from the plain but functional mudroom fridge that somehow the urgency has passed. Visitors tend to fan the flames of indignation when they throw open the glamorous stainless steel doors only to find room temperature, empty white shelves. But since the repair company hasn’t called us in over two weeks, I suspect we may be at a stand off.

That’s alright, my husband and I decided it might be time to indulge in a little weekend break, one that didn’t involve packing up a suitcase of diapers, rash cream, 20 changes of clothing for a 3 day period, and half the ‘read with me’ series from the local library. In short, not taking the kids. Kind friends were engaged, the children gently broken into the idea, and the countdown could begin. Except, while everyone has been in marvelous health for the past couple of months, both children and I have come down with a mystery malaise that could be a summer cold, a sinus infection or an ungodly plague of allergies, or all three, causing us streaming noses, foggy heads and unsteady feet.

The youngest, just officially entering his terrible twos, has spent the past week endlessly drooling thanks to the arrival of three new teeth. His allergy-laced head cold, red, streaming eyes, and an inner-ear equilibrium apparently off, are all seriously impeding the simple task of walking and causing him to fall, Charlie Chaplin-style, every fifteen to twenty minutes. Adding insult to injury, it turns out the hand-me-down shoes we’ve been clamping on his feet might have tipped the odds out of his favour. After one spectacular fall when he tripped over his own feet, I rushed him to a proper shoe store to get his feet properly measured. Not only are they still unusually wide, (which limits the selection to five sensible styles in a store full of hundreds with shiny fire engines and glittery rainbows), they were a whole size smaller than the shoes he was already wearing. The clerk looked at me as though I was morally bankrupt. Or maybe it was the gash in his lip that prompted the disdain.

Pre-trip nerves over leaving two reasonably compliant under-five year olds with congenial family friends are probably warranted, even appropriate. But the prospect of leaving two teething, snotty, tearful, foggy children, and an 80% chance of a related ear infection in one if not two, certainly ups the ante and makes me wonder whether we should arrange back up least the first set flee the house screaming.

The fat lip from the shoe-related fall has also put a tiny hiccup in the youngest’s very recent speech development. Favourite words are currently fish, fire truck, and fountain, all which are now being repeated incessantly with sh- in place of f-, earning strange looks as he belts out shish, shuck and shount-it. Or again, perhaps it’s the facial damage that is being clocked and sniffed at as proof of lax mothering. At least I managed to intercept him before he ran over the driveway’s hot asphalt in his new correctly fitting shoes as I don’t know how I’d have explained melted soles and burnt feet.

Our weekend trip is still on, and I’ve primed the paediatrician that she may get a call about my son’s ears. But it’s only just dawned on me that this Friday is the 13th. Given the way the week’s going, perhaps we should stay put.

Preservation Nation

2011-05-05T09:00:00.000-04:00

There are predictable ways to tell you’re getting older: You marvel at the cost of things you barely blinked at before or start to say cringe-worthy things along the lines of, “My! How tall you are!”, suddenly sounding like the wolf in The Tale of Little Red Riding Hood. Not surprisingly, after a decade and a half of capturing my trans-Atlantic reunions first on 35mm, later on hordes of unsorted digital shots, my pilgrimages now resemble one of those flipbooks with hand-drawn characters that animate as you flick your way through the pages. A decade or two ago, trips home hinged critically on meeting up with old friends in hip bars, dimly lit Soho restaurants, or newly minted club nights, the preserve of those in the know, long before they became popular and chav-ridden. Now, with children in tow, the meet-ups are increasingly likely to occur in the daytime, as family-themed affairs. You kill two birds with one stone by getting a couple of friends together and letting the collective progeny entertain each other. And the presence of a husband or two is viewed as a coup.

The most recent pilgrimage was no different except our grown up plans were now the subject of our parents’ mirth and titillation. And in the middle stood the source: The National Trust. I can’t tell you how many childhood school trips, family days-out or other minivan-oriented excursions have ended up some British National Trust site or another. Unusually, in our bolshy mid-teens, my girlfriends and I would ask to be dropped off at Cliveden House, former home of Lord and Lady Astor, on sunny weekend afternoons. Although I can vouch for the Trust’s excellent afternoon teas, our interest was more closely allied with an opportunity to stroll the gardens smoking the stale Silk Cuts stashed in my knock-off Givenchy handbag. Given the perfumed body spray applied as a mask, I can’t fathom why my mother didn’t ask why we smelled like a bordello at pick up. I’ll be all over it if my daughter pulls a similar stunt.

In one hot, sunny, pre-Royal Wedding week at home, we managed to fit in two trips to Cliveden, one to Hughenden Manor, and another to Wisley, although that’s technically part of the Royal Horticultural Society. We almost made it to Poulsden Lacey, and Waddesden and Chartwell were mentally on the cards. As our mothers laughed at the civilized hours of our social plans, the man at Cliveden’s ticket entrance was not impressed that I wasn’t carrying a US National Trust card which would have garnered free entry via a reciprocal program. You live and learn.

So I felt a little sheepish about all the stately homes and grounds socializing missing from my life stateside until I redeemed myself with the realization that my memberships had merely expired and the long, harsh winter had all but wiped my memory clean of sunny days out and grassy lawns. I’d been a card-carrying (decal-driving) member of NYS Parks for some years, taking in some of the truly beautiful areas in the Capital Region, Adirondacks and Berkshires. Moreover, I had joined the Berkshire Botanical Society, part of the American Horticultural Society. On top of all that, I had officially joined the Massachusetts Trustees of Reservations during a visit to Naumkeag in Stockbridge, MA, on a – vindication! – mother/child joint play-date. Even if I first read about Naumkeag in a Sunday Times travel piece that my mother sent me from London; at least I could say I was a frequent visitor at the Red Lion Inn.

Discussing this, I met surprise at the existence of an American counterpart to the National Trust. (Like a distant aunt, many Brits are guilty of keeping the US forever young in our aging minds.) In a kneejerk reaction (based on the way it’s okay to comment on your own mother but woe betide someone else who chimes in), I extolled the assets of my adopted home, specifically upstate since the city needs zero help. Stick a fork in a map of Columbia County or the Berkshires and it’s easy to rattle off an extraordinary list of historic names from President van Buren to authors Herman Melville and Edith Wharton, and estates like Clermont, Livingston and Olana that predate any rockstar’s single-name predilection.

Nonetheless, I worried that I was slacking and the time spent choosing glorious British grounds to rendez-vous had to be matched in New York upon my return. In the short week that I’ve been back, I’ve managed to renew our expired memberships, check events calendars, and start plotting a course for the summer. That's if we can just get a break from that British-style rain.

Union Jacks, Spider Coffee and Puppy Ice Cream

2011-04-28T09:00:00.001-04:00

I’ve been nattering on about my recent efforts to feed British culinary delights – something Americans might call an oxymoron – to our children, especially in light of our newest kitchen acquisition, “The National Trust’s Complete Traditional Cookbook.” Suddenly, the kitchen is a hive of activity with bubble and squeak, toad-in-the-hole, and Welsh cakes making an appearance. If my Sunday roasts have always been accompanied by Yorkshire puddings, they are now getting a shot in the arm with some traditional sides and puds, many with recipes dating back anywhere from the nineteenth through fifteenth centuries. I’m not likely to bake a giant pie from which birds or frogs will burst forth – something ancestral Brits apparently found absolutely hysterical – but I do appreciate the sense of familiar that permeates the book’s recipes from the stodgy dumplings of school days to hearty wine-soaked stews, or hydropathic summer puddings, sweet syllabubs, flummeries, and fools.

For a good part of our trip home to the UK, I was on a mission having had my heart set on a Jan Constantine flag teapot and cake comport for the better part of a year. Moreover, another British designer, Emma Bridgewater, has an equally covetous line of china, and both Jan and Emma have been fueling the UK’s current love of anything embellished with a Union Jack. It might be hard for Americans to imagine a country where the countrymen typically shy away from any products emblazoned with the national flag. Until quite recently in the UK, such articles would prompt wrinkled noses, and were left solely for tourists or people of dubiously nationalist tendencies. Conversely, America is nation of flag lovers. At the apex is the July 4th holiday, where flag adornment spills over from decorating the occasional house and spawns chains of bunting and entire families clad head to foot in glittery flag regalia. In the US, stars and stripes and the national anthem are flown and sung at every opportunity from ball games to morning school assemblies. And I, for one, will always associate my nerve-wracking trips to Immigration and Naturalization appointments with the presence of heavy weight, heavily-tassled American flags standing imposingly in every office.

Landing in the UK on this trip was something like a step back in time. First, I haven’t seen so many flags aflutter since the Queen’s Jubilee or Chas and Di’s wedding. So with another royal wedding in the offing and the 2012 London Olympics heating up, the UK appeared to have caught national fever. Streets were strung with Union flag bunting, and every shop window in town was kitted out with royal flags, street party scenes, commemorative china and even a bath-time saucy royal wedding display in Agent Provocateur. So my simple hunt for platter and teapot was now horrifically complicated since retailers were simultaneously pumping out Union Jack dishware at every turn and price point. And after working out the gob-smacking shipping rates necessary to dispatch my selections, I settled for a Union Jack cake stand neurotically-wrapped, Michelin-man style, and stashed in my luggage.

Nothing is as quintessentially English as afternoon tea and luckily my parents treat it as a high point in any day. Thanks to gorgeous spring weather, we took tea outside in a bucolic scene straight out of a Famous Five book, and while the teapot warmed, cake was sliced, cups and saucers were distributed, and my daughter asked for stories of my childhood. Typically these tales involve my brother’s spectacular spills falling out of tree houses or ending up in hospital. Lacking such scrapes, I was left with more pedestrian events, such as the spider coffee incident. In the 1980s, when Britain practically ran on granulated instant coffee, I presented two cups to my parents in the cups and saucers left overnight on counter. As she drained her cup, my mother screamed and there, scorched to the bottom by the scalding water, was a huge English house spider. Long before people were buying expensive coffee beans cycled through the digestive systems of Indonesian monkeys, my mother had consumed spider coffee.

The gravity of this tale trumped all others, and I was asked to repeat it ad infinitum on the flight home. But its supremacy was short-lived. Back in the US, we heard a new tale involving my two-year old son and Frosty Paws ice-cream. Undeterred by the Purina pet food packaging, my in-laws had picked it up as a tasty after-dinner treat for their son and grandson while I was away. My son gobbled them up. And it wasn’t until my husband read the tagline, “Frosty treats for cool dogs,” that anyone actually twigged.

An Englishman in New York

2011-04-21T09:00:00.000-04:00

Having missed it last summer, I was determined to finally see Jason Bell’s exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. For starters, it would give me yet another chance to plonk a child on the back of one of the black lions flanking Nelson’s column. Something we seem to do with the same frequency we mark incremental height increases of our progeny in pencil on the wall. For another, we’d be able to eat in the crypt at St. Martin’s in the Field. Any opportunity to eat hearty food in a crypt should be seized. It’s just too wonderfully peculiar and the crypt’s menu is cracking. Finally, the desire to see Jason’s environmental portraits of Englishmen and women in New York had struck a chord too bold to ignore. The exhibition was closing just four days after we arrived and although he hadn’t photographed me I wondered if I’d see something of myself in them.

As a visiting New Yorker, it might not be that curious to arrive with an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in mind. For a native Londoner, or at least a Home Counties girl, it might not be odd to come up with that as a plan for a free day or a coffee date either. But my recent returns (wearing both hats) were increasingly feeling like an odd condition of limbo, a British national comfortably familiar with the layout of London but as hungry as a tourist to inhale on a smorgasbord of all things British. This experience seems common to ex-pats, and a quick rifle through the various online forums designed to serve the queries of Brits abroad or those attempting to repatriate proves the point. There’s an urge to revisit and recharge, maybe to reactivate memories that can fade on foreign soil with an absence of friendly sources to ping them back into focus. No doubt it’s the reason I suddenly have to eat vinegary fish and chips with mushy peas, crave a cuzza, smile indulgently at (hitherto revolting) late night donner kebab vans, and stuff my luggage with jars of Marmite.

I bristle a little at the word ‘expat’. After all, noone likes to feel irrelevant to the big picture, ostracised from family, especially when you still keenly vote by proxy from overseas. An old employer once quipped there’s nothing quite as ex as an ex-employee, and somehow ‘expat’ – a word that has to be practically spat - has a similar vibe. So, back on London terra firma, proving my mental dexterity in negotiating streets and the underground subway system map-free is probably as important to me as the 0-60mph acceleration of a bright red Lamborghini to a middle-aged man. (He’s still got it and so have I.) It’s the reason I can be found sheepishly posing for pictures with my little British-American children in front of red telephone boxes and London landmarks. It’s also the reason I’m quite happy to pick up trinkets from souvenir stalls like Union Jack tissues and Big Ben fridge magnets. In some weird way, I must be operating on a theory that the more touristy memorabilia I accumulate, the more armoured protection I’ll have from losing my English status. Throw in a royal wedding and suddenly the need includes flag bunting and a royal mug.

In his photo assignment for American Vogue, a shoot featuring English models in the Manhattan-located English tea room, ‘Tea and Sympathy’, photographer Jason Bell was told that over 120,000 Brits currently live in New York City. He may have been surprised but frankly I wasn’t. You can hardly walk a block in the city without hearing recognisable clips of British accents, north and south, which possibly explains why British expats are collectively nicknamed ‘teabags’ around town. Nonetheless as an industrious Englishman living and working in New York, this statistical gem prompted Mr. Bell to seek out his countrymen and ultimately photograph them in their natural New York work environments. From cab drivers, policemen, designers, and deep-sea divers to the more famous faces of musician Sting, actor Kate Winslet, writer Zoe Heller, geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, or the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he captured them on film underscoring the breadth of this British exodus and its impact on the cultural life of the city.

My interest was piqued not only by the exhibition description but an assertion of what the photographer had found. A quote in the exhibition’s accompanying book explained, “Amidst all the questions about why people have come here and what they had left behind, I learnt a little bit more about what it means to be English, what it means to be a New Yorker, and where the two intersect.” And in tiny room 38a of the National Portrait Gallery the faces looked as familiar as any daily street scene and the backgrounds felt remarkably like home. That a NYPD cop, city man holes, and retractable fire escape ladders should all look warmly familiar while standing in a museum in the centre of London struck me as proof that my New York and British identities had just collided.

Outside, my daughter threw money to a gold-painted mime and danced to a busker outside the National Gallery while a huge digital display clock counted down the days, minutes and seconds to the London Olympics 2012. Despite not owning a London transport Oyster card or having previously seen the London Mayor’s ‘Boris bikes’ neatly lined up for self-hire and return, such changes didn’t make me feel any less at home. I did however manage to pick up a red London telephone box key chain as a protective talisman to take home with me to New York.

A Right Royal Fuss

2011-04-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

The major news stations are frantically covering Will & Kate’s final official movements before their wedding as royal fever gains momentum. You’d think they were leaving the country or something. But then, their handlers keenly noted the north-south divide and the north’s cooler reaction to the wedding news by scheduling their final engagemet ‘up north’. It appears the application for street party permits have been fiercely skewed towards London and the South-East. London already has five hundred street party applications in the system; Lancaster, the location of the final pre-nuptial stop, only one. Enter Prime Minister David Cameron to the rescue. Stuff the local councils and all that red tape and bureaucracy! If you want to party with the royals, go ahead and do it! No crowd permits, no liqueur licenses, no street closing applications required. If only government would take a leaf out of his sweeping decision book, so much could be expedited.

Fortunately, our trip home to the Motherland will miss the wedding by a few days. I say fortunately since traveling back to the UK during a royal wedding is like willfully flying into the eye of a storm. You can imagine the chaos, even if it is an orderly, queuing-up sort of chaos, that London will endure. And now that the nation has been given carte blanche to fight for their right to party, it appears streets may be shut down so the residents can celebrate block party-style. Such freedoms sound positively American – a government-given right to revel with the royals – but it’s hard to imagine such abandonment of stricture over here. Smacks of anarchy.

In the media feeding frenzy, we’re now being treated to childhood snapshots of Kate Middleton at three and half years old on holiday in the Lake District. Kate at five years old on holiday in Jordan (there must be a story to dig up there). Kate on her graduation day from St. Andrews. In many ways it reinforces the fairytale reality of the commoner marrying royalty. I’m hard pressed to imagine William’s photo album looking similar with shots of Balmoral, Windsor Castle, or international destinations beside his mother, the Princess of Hearts.

As businesses capitalize on the merchandising possibilities, we see how far the world has come since the 1981 royal wedding. While the U.S. makers of Pez candy dispensers are auctioning off a pair of William and Kate Pez dispensers, British manufacturers have usurped the traditional realm of Royal china mugs and plates with such peculiar items as a full-size refrigerator decal of the lovebirds, your very own Princess Catharine Engagement doll, retailing for a mere £35, or a pair of matching royal gnomes complete with Union Jack hats (which I secretly want.) You can also purchase an entire toddler-friendly royal family procession at Mothercare for £15, or a limited edition, royal wedding ‘Kiss Me Kate’ beer by Castle Rock brewery, being sold in Morrison supermarkets nationwide.

Some of the foreign manufacturers appear to be getting a little confused. One online merchant has a royal wedding mug featuring Kate Middleton and…Harry. You have to wonder who approved the graphics for that one. I once bought a supposedly rare Beatles CD on eBay, but when it arrived, it featured a photocopied album cover insert and what can only be described as Japanese karaoke singers crooning strange versions of Beatles hits.

During our trip home last year, we made a point of heading into London for Trooping the Colour, The Queen’s annual birthday parade, with some friends from Germany. Crowds thronged Hyde Park and lined The Mall leading to Buckingham Palace. Standing with royalists and tourists, we cheered and waved as regiments of gleaming mounted guards processed past, followed by black and gold horse-drawn carriages carrying the royal family. So when a little girl in pre-school recently informed my daughter that princesses aren’t real, she puffed out her chest and informed her that in England they certainly are. And that the Queen’s husband waved right at her.

We’ll be in and out before the royal wedding takes place. The American news channels are already primed to provide up to the minute coverage starting the night before and gearing up for the 6am EST start. Some things are admittedly better observed from the comfort of your sitting room far from the madding crowds, think Times Square on New Year’s Eve or opening and closing ceremonies at the Olympics. Just as I call my four-year old daughter to leave for the airport, I am swiftly corrected. Amidst all this talk of royals as we depart to England, a change has occurred. I am now to call her Princess Grace, please. Who am I to argue? Certainly, Your Highness.

Eat, Indoctrinate, Love

2011-04-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

Travel is the great educator. Off you go on a voyage of discovery to experience foreign culture, terrain, architecture, people, and most of all, food. It’s a little addictive as you start to colour outside everything familiar - your childhood, upbringing, and hometown - and start borrowing from all these new experiences in ways that inevitably expand and influence the way you’ll live. I still poach eggs in water brought to a rolling boil with a drop of vinegar, the way a friend’s Polish grandmother showed me when I lived in Warsaw, and my Greek dishes are modeled after those I ate living on Nissyros, a Greek island. I prepare a version of an Afghan tomato and potato masala dish topped with fried eggs, courtesy of an Afghan friend. And, of course, there’s my passion for avocados, simply halved, pitted, and filled with homemade vinaigrette, just as the French do.

Foreign travel lets you squirrel away tastes and images and borrow them for your cooking, and furnishings when you return home. But when you move whole hog to another country, set up home, have children and live life like a native, the effect is something rather different. Suddenly, like a play within a play, you’re part of that foreign culture, a little personal island of Old World customs, teaching your children about two homes, the one around them and the other, “back home”.

When we bought a 1750s house in upstate New York, its history wasn’t lost on me. As part of the original van Rensselaer estate, it was Dutch owned land, a feudal patroonship, functioning independently from the overwhelming changes affecting the colonies or naissant states of post-revolutionary America. Such a novel and peculiar history struck a chord. In preserving a sense of bi-national identity in my American-born children, clearly I have been running a British-owned cultural patroonship too.

After fifteen years stateside, there’s little to distinguish me from the average parenting practices of any mother of two, except maybe the bilingual use of British and American terms and a good faith effort to wield knives and forks the way nationals on both sides of the pond would do. Over the years, dinner has run the gamut from Thai curries to fish tacos, boeuf bourgignonne to burgers, mirroring the incredible melting pot of American food. But, inevitably, my British upbringing has its own contributions to the mix. Left over Sunday roast ends up as bubble and squeak. In a pinch, a quick supper for the children’s tea can be fish fingers and beans on toast. Pancakes are crepes: breakfast often involves marmite. And we can’t forget good old rhubarb crumble.

The longer I live abroad, and the more I cook with my children, the more I want to serve up the food of my childhood. We must be wired to obsess over nurturing our progeny with foods tied to memories and a feeling of home. I’ve tapped my mother for her own recipes and badgered her into bringing her battered old cookbook on my parents’ last trip over, though we barely cracked the cover. Now, thanks to the ongoing resurgence of interest in fresh food, sustainable local farming, and good old glorious British food, the UK’s National Trust has re-released a cookbook: ‘The Complete Traditional Recipe Book’, featuring such classic winners as Toad in the Hole, Spotted Dick, and a host of regional gems like Stargazy Pie from Cornwall and Singin’ Hinnies from Northumberland.

I practically crowed at this wild discovery. Not only might it answer the daily dinner conundrum (at 480 pages long, there must be a lot of recipes in there) but it gives me an opportunity to recapture all those dishes of my youth, even the hated dumpling beef stew of school dinner days. Best of all I can continue my cultural indoctrination efforts, creating food memories and feeding British culture into my American-born offspring, one forkful at a time.

The Dog in the Black Hat

2011-03-30T09:00:00.000-04:00

Thinking back to 2003, and the summer we moved to Columbia County, several events are sandwiched together in my mind: meeting the ineffably glamorous figures of Ginny and Albert Callan, the latter a former Courier editor and my husband’s godfather; the subsequent outing of Albert as the man behind “The Man in the Black Hat” with a very public book signing of collected columns in a similarly named book; and finally - predating marriage or kids - the arrival of Winnie, our very first puppy.

Over that first summer, we wrestled with the typical headaches of first-time home ownership. As a transplanted city dweller, I spent many panicked hours trying to get to grips with a septic system, well water, and the finer points of the culinary arts. When Winnie entered the scene, she brought with her a host of unparalleled antics that would soon grace the pages of The Courier in my new column. Sadly, Albert passed away before ‘Green Acres’ hit the newsstand as another Page Five column, but he was certainly present for one of Winnie’s favourite tricks when she paraded before him at dinner with my underwear in her mouth.

This past week, eight years on, we sadly said goodbye to Winnie after a long, proud battle with failing kidneys. Until the end, she wouldn’t turn down a chance to steal unattended food, put the smackdown on her adopted brother Oscar, creep into our verboten bed, or lick the lips of some hapless human victim. To thank her for providing fodder for so many columns, it only seems right to see her off with some memories from one of the earliest.

“The move to country living brought its own set of responsibilities, including Winnie. My husband and I had discussed the pros and cons of owning a dog. On the plus side, we wanted one. On the minus side, the absence of a fenced yard plus my business travel, my husband’s erratic recording schedule, and our lack of training experience seemed to tip the scales in favor of waiting. But, with voodoo and a Siren song, Winnie had my husband sufficiently smitten to make a six-hour drive to Hershey, Pennsylvania, despite the pain of a herniated disc. One month after moving to East Chatham, Winifried Ginger Von Rocketdog tumbled into my birthday sleep, a wiggly seven-week old Boxer with too-large paws. A mere three weeks later, I awoke tear streaked and sleep deprived from the 24 hour bathroom trips, and presented my husband with a meltdown and ultimatum: The dog or me.

Winnie set the bar high to win me over with tests of love and endurance. It started with two pairs of summer kitten-heels (the black and the blue), a couple of stiletto sling-backs (the mock croc and brown suede) and some pretty pink slides. Her appetite for leather knew no bounds. With the nose of a woman at a Filene’s shoe sale, she passed on chunky Steve Maddens and demolished peep-toe Miu Mius, hid Nine Wests but chomped on Etienne Aigner. Ignoring funky Chinese Laundry, she savored new, red suede Christian Louboutin, delicious right out of the box. Twelve pairs in as many weeks was a dagger in my heart, caused temporary blindness, delirium tremors, and shoe separation anxiety.

Our unflappable trainer assured us we had to know Winnie’s whereabouts at all times and encouraged us to emulate the Monks of New Skete with her dog leash knotted to our sides. Unable to cope with a four-foot umbilical cord, I caved in. And, freed from Mama’s apron strings, Winnie’s palate matured. She’d appear, shovel-jaws gummed shut with kitty clumping litter, lips sudsy from miniature green tea guest soaps; full of pride from the stealthy demolition of a two-pound block of cheese, or regretfully vomiting a putrid carcass onto my kitchen floor.

I’m told owning a dog is good preparation for life skills and parenting. A colleague once assessed my dating habits -- and predictable two-year itch -- with a prescription to get a dog. Elsewhere, a colleague claimed all prospective parents should own a dog to learn patience, tolerance, and negotiation skills. Somewhere along the way, I married and let go of a few hang-ups about personal space and prized possessions. I’m a pro at wielding pills, Pepto, and a poop-a-scoop. I’ve even found a Zen acceptance of occasional chewing casualties, (including this month’s unread Architectural Digest), and the delivery of my underwear to guests during dinner. Oscar ate my orange suede Wanted sneakers this weekend and I barely batted an eyelid. Just know I can’t be held responsible for my actions if Winnie ever finds my Jimmy Choo’s…”

Go Green, Ride a Rickshaw

2011-03-24T09:00:00.000-04:00

I have a new appreciation for the power it takes to pull a rickshaw. You have probably spotted those caboose-like pods behind bicycles, the ones toting precious cargo, namely the cyclists’ offspring. It’s a clever idea with two in tow since you simply strap them in and head off. Like others, our trailer-pod, a Schwinn, comes with two nifty extras: a handlebar attachment and a handy third wheel to stabilize the tow bar, like a Robin Reliant, once you’ve unhitched your 2-wheeler. Suddenly, your road caboose is transformed into a rather bulky double stroller (with a remarkable resemblance to a tea cosy on wheels) and, strapped into jump seats with an optional head to floor rain window, the children love it.

Last week, the arrival of two reasonably warm days after an endless winter virtually catapulted us out the front door with the promise of fresh air that wouldn’t end in frostbite. We weren’t bike riding but the large wheeled trailer blows fair-weather strollers out of the slush, so we chose it to walk the river trail by the Hudson. Except, in our enthusiasm to get out of the house, we brought the trailer and its zip off window but forgot the handlebar and third wheel. A passenger trailer without a bike to pull it or handlebars to push it is rendered useless – a sort of grounded egg - until we happened on the brilliant idea of towing it ourselves.

Riding high like British tropical colonists, our children barked directions at the out of shape parents hauling them across the sludgy, thawing paths. Every now and then the load would inexplicably double, the result of one or both craning forward for a better view. The shift in weight altered the whole physics of the drag: While reclining, the weight was born by the wheels but leaning forward, it pressed down on the tow bar and the human mule pulling it. In the unlikely event I ever find myself flagging down a rickshaw in Manhattan or Calcutta, I shall be sure to sit as far back as possible and stay impossibly still.

There have been arguments for and against rickshaws. In India they are now forbidden, since many were operated by children. They still run and the pullers count it as a valid way to make a buck, or at least a few rupees. When the streets are flooded it’s sometimes the only way to get around even if the poor entity struggling in front is chest high in water. Westward, the attraction of the eco-friendly, emission-free, bicycle-powered rickshaw has its own appeal, especially among proponents of slow travel. Upon exiting a Manhattan restaurant you’re now just as likely to find a rickshaw squeaking to a halt as a yellow cab braking for a potential fare.

I’ll confess I’ve been wary of rickshaws. There just seems something a little wrong about a method of transportation that literally relies on the sweat equity of the driver, even when willing. But perhaps all this is about to change. As the Middle East once again struggles with civil war and international airstrikes, fears over oil accessibility and prices spike. With America consuming 10% of the world’s oil on any given day, news pundits are hopping all over the predictions of $5 a gallon oil prices, and urging those in the market for Hybrid vehicle to get out and buy one before prices go up and availability goes down.

Unfortunately, I recently switched from my aging, gas-sipping Toyota Rav-4, (sticking my eco-friendly protestations in my pocket) to take on a 7-seater used but thirsty Volvo XC-90. Now the whole family can venture out in one vehicle with room for the dogs and a friend or two but we might have to flog the family silver to pay for the gas.

The Volvo XC-90 comes with some spectacular features that transport me back to the days of my Audi TT: Heated leather seats, volume control on the steering wheel, electric wing mirrors and an endless array of interesting and informative messages appear on the consol. Since it costs a third more to fill up the Volvo than the RAV-4, I get a kick out of a periodic message that tells me when I’m getting 99.9mpg. Downhill. Without my foot on the gas. Either someone in Volvo manufacturing had a sick sense of humour or it’s the type of blip Y2K conspiracy theorists worried about before the noughties.

Commentators are already wagging their fingers over the American reliance on cars and oil, and I can already hear the faint drumbeat of Sarah Palin’s, “Drill, baby, drill.” So I’m here to advocate for the rickshaw pullers of the world. Unite! You’re already ahead of the pack.

No pressure; just let my child in.

2011-03-17T09:00:00.001-04:00

I’ve just returned from a kindergarten assessment at a nearby private school. Despite my reassurances that this would just be a fun meeting, a play date of sorts, my preschooler was anxious. She had never been there before, she explained. And although they may want to ask her questions, she anticipated she might be shy. Instead, she had a ball. She moved around the staff stations like a congenial host, answering questions, showing off her alphabet letters when asked, rhyming words, counting out blocks, and demonstrating her skill-set in hopping, skipping, and scissor mastery.

Required to sit on the sidelines, I couldn’t help peering and peeking, trying to see the pictures she was describing and wondering if her lower case letters were sitting neatly in a line. I walked over to a tissue box on a side table, feigning sniffles, all a ruse to get a better look as I walked past. Other mothers busied themselves with the contents of handbags and stole glances at the other preschoolers going through the motions. By the time it was all over, my cheeks were hurting from smiling sweetly and nodding encouragement to the other mums and their pint-sized progeny.

I am certain I’m not a pushy mother; I know this having encountered a few, including a very nice Cypriot mother of four lounging by the pool on our recent trip to Florida. Her children were each exceptional in some way but, as she explained, one or two needed more coaching and pushing than others. Don’t let them slide by in preschool, she cautioned. You need them to stand out! My bent has been learning through creative play, so Waldorf and Montessori approaches have always held broad liberal appeal, but now, faced with a kindergarten assessor, her tales of separating wheat from chafe filled me with a new kind of fear over the pressure to get in.

A few years back, I read a revelatory piece in the New York Times magazine that described the pressure cooker process of admissions for top New York City kindergartens. The author, in the position of securing a spot for her own child, found herself caught up in the mummy wars over first and second choice schools, and waiting in agony for letters of acceptance to come in the mail. The dismay – no, the shame – that came with rejection letters voicing sorrow at not offering a place, smacked of paranoia, competition gone awry. The last time I dwelt on academic admissions so earnestly was awaiting selection by university and graduate schools, but kindergarten? This had to be rooted in status, not outcome.

My new Cypriot friend was patient. Exceptional children need exceptional schooling. Each of her girls were bright, conversational, and apparently academic, but the local state school wasn’t going to afford the opportunities her girls would need to shine. To her credit, she championed the state school system, but only schools for the gifted. And the admissions process, especially for the School of Performing Arts, sounded as cut –throat and arduous as any audition for ‘Fame’. Still, she clearly had her reasons: among her daughter’s classmates is Lourdes, Madonna’s child.

A few years back, a work colleague was in a panic. She’d had her daughter’s name on the waiting list for Albany Academy for Girls, a single-sex private school of note, since her child was one. Now, although she had made it into their co-ed kindergarten program, it was unclear whether there would be enough places, based on gender, for her to continue the following year. Her lament? She should have registered her pre-birth. An in utero registration was necessary, it seemed.

I was late to understand the social stratification of schools in the US. As a foreign undergraduate, I didn’t know about the Ivy League, or the private schools that fed them. In picking my American exchange, I cared only about its proximity to New York City. And since no city colleges had partnered with my university, the upstate SUNY system was next. So, I could have attended Amherst, or even the University of Miami, but instead my sights were set on Albany. Stateside, I soon picked up the academic pecking order, and the obnoxiousness of a family friend’s perpetual reference to his children as ‘Brown’ and ‘Yale’.

At the assessment, I saw a mother join her child at one of the tables to help lead her in answering the teacher’s questions. I had a knee-jerk guilty reaction: Should I be doing the same? But above the hubbub of teachers’ voices and children playing, I heard my daughter’s four-year old voice piping out her ABCs. It’s human nature to want the best for your child but if the point of assessment is to measure readiness, it’s not a decision that should be forced. If anything, it’s the first time they stand away from you and demonstrate a little of what they know. While I sat with these anxious parents, our children were happily playing along, oblivious to the observations taking place. When it was over, a teacher returned my daughter to me and assured me I had a bright, verbal child. I should wait for a phone call with their decision, I was told. No pressure, I thought. But I still hope she gets in.

Flippin' Pancakes

2011-03-10T09:00:00.000-05:00

Any week that involves flipping pancakes and gorging on them with reckless abandon is a great week in my book. So this week has been marvelous. Pancake day, also known as Shrove Tuesday or Fat Tuesday among its other monikers, is one of those holidays where Brits excel. Give us a half a chance to go hog wild with something quirky and we will. When we’re not Morris dancing around May poles, rolling large cheeses down hills, or burning effigies of traitors on bonfires, you’ll find us flipping pancakes with gusto. Of course, its roots are based squarely in Christianity with the idea of using up all the eggs, butter and milk before Lent, but along the way it’s become the bastion of school children intent on beating last year’s record and trumping each other for bragging rights at school the next day.

A few years ago, newspapers were spouting sad statistics about the demise of the Pancake Day tradition. Children were too involved in their Nintendo DS and Wiis to care much about flipping pancakes. Immigration took some blame. (Apparently the steady influx of Polish and Indian immigrants hadn’t grabbed the tradition of pancakes by the horns, while resident Brits had taken to rogan josh and pierogies like ducks to water.) The Americanization of culture was blamed. Where thin French crepes had previously ruled British plates, now stacks of fluffy American-style pancakes were all the rage, topped off with pats of butter and slathered in imported Vermont maple syrup.

Fortunately, reality television stepped up to the plate and, over the course of several years, elevated the rising stars of the culinary world to heroes, birthing an entire tax bracket of “celebrity chefs”. It’s now possible to simply Google ‘celebrity chef UK’ to get the low-down on their restaurants, television shows and thoughts on food. Hand in hand with the growth of the locavore and slow food movements, this has actually done wonders for a resurgence of traditional home cooking and brought the best of British back into vogue.

Of course, Americans require unending forgiveness for the consistent mirth surrounding British cuisine. Talk about the Royal Family and all eyes are agog; talk about British cooking and the titters erupt. Luckily, dry wit and biting sarcasm – something many Brits do rather well – seems to be admired over here as the imports of likes of Simon Cowell (American Idol), Anne Robinson (The Weakest Link) and Gordon Ramsey (Kitchen Nightmares) prove rather nicely. Gordon Ramsey, one of the official celebrity chefs, can be credited through his television show with his British Campaign for Real Gravy. Meanwhile Jamie Oliver, another inciter of populist change, revolutionized school lunches in Britain after almost single-handedly forcing the government to address childhood obesity and revamp the menu.

So there is power in being a celebrity chef. Hester Blumenthal, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsey, Delia Smith, Raymond Blanc, to name a few, (and often referred to on first name terms like their industrious Super Model counterparts), have far reaching clout as restauranteurs, cookbook authors, television hosts, locavore activists, and even as columnists. Which brings me back to Pancake day. In his Guardian newspaper column, Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall waxes lyrical about the beauty of batter and the vast array of ways to tantalize your taste buds. Like me, he’s fond of all the traditional touchstones of the day, the pancake flipping, the childhood fun of whisking and pouring, but then he busts out a whole new vernacular in the creative department suggesting pancakes made from pureed rice, bulgar, quinoa or sweet potato. These departures all sound pretty good, (certainly a good deal more appetizing than Hester Blumenthal’s infamous snail porridge which arguably could form a regrettable basis for a pancake) but while celebrity chefs continue to deviate I find myself remaining old-school, a classic crepe girl, lemon and sugar all the way. Anything else feels like treason and you already know what we do to traitors.

The 2011 Oscars: You Were Invited, Sort Of

2011-03-03T09:00:00.000-05:00

Look, Academy, I get it: You wanted to mix things up, appeal to a younger audience (as the current obsession dictates), shake up the format a little. The concept of transformation has already permeated government agencies and every institution from banking to business, so it is no surprise that the Academy’s switch to: New! Different! Interactive! Generation (se)X/Y! should be modus operandi.

But face it. The Oscars is Tinseltown’s longest running, most prestigious awards ceremony dripping in diamonds and Hollywood movie glamour. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Oscar Night is my Super Bowl, my British Open. I block it out as unavailable a year in advance. I don’t do parties, or accept guests; can’t afford the distraction. Even our rescue dog has a naked golden man as his namesake and Oscar night as a given birthday. For this year’s 83rd Oscars, I made sure our vacation flight would get us home in time, despite holiday crowds and weather delays. It’s the one evening when I am officially given carte blanche to park myself in front of the television, uninterrupted, and I’ll fight to the death. This is the treatment my husband requests for any golf major, but since there are four of those only the Masters is actually etched in stone.

At heart, surely the allure is the enduring role that film plays in our lives, transcending war, depression or crises. Through it all, people watch movies. The awards ceremony builds on the rich legacy of the silver screen – silent Chaplin, Clara Bow lips, finger-waved hair, musicals, frontier battles, aliens, animation, and every condition of love. The awards recognize the immense growth of industry arts, from CGI to prosthetic make up, and the newer expectation that actors should actually embody their characters through remarkable physical transformations. (There’s that word again).

On Oscar night, it’s glamour we lust after. As the actors prepare to scratch each other’s backs and the industry rewards movie makers’ magical contributions, we sit ourselves down to feast on the lights! the fashion! the nervous young actors weighed down with rocks and draped in couture giggling nervously at microphones and the sight of heavyweight luminaries. This is Hollywood pomp and pageantry at its best.

I’d been primed for the Academy shake up with various ‘pre-game’ reviews. The theme, “You’re Invited”, sounded worryingly egalitarian for an elite black tie event. They wanted to sate our multi-tasking eyes with websites, live post-award party feeds, Twitter updates, and an iPhone app. The New York Times reported the Academy was “making a major play for a new audience, one that communicates in satire and snark, not just reverence.” Well, of course we’d be sending little Facebook comments back and forth to friends, but how was that their concern? The hosts, James Franco & Anne Hathaway, the youngest in Oscar history, apparently fit the Academy’s goal, as Anne helpfully reiterated, of “young and hip”. The trouble was that neither one had the satirical chops to deliver any comedic punch. Filling the shoes of Bob Hope, Billy Crystal, Johnny Carson, Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, Hugh Jackman, even David Letterman, to name a few, meant the young duo had big shoes to fill, and too little seasoning on either side.

It went from bad to worse. James and Anne were precociously star struck, (perhaps to diffuse nerves), goofy (perhaps to win over the audience), and boring in their prodigious bowing and scraping. For Anne, it involved a lot of whooping and hollering until she resembled a popular teen host of a high school talent show rather than an award ceremony emcee. In the show’s finale she was so busy high-fiving the P.S. 22 school choristers within arm’s reach she appeared to have come unhinged with relief at the show’s saccharine end. James’ blandly-delivered but syrupy odes to celebrity demi-gods upped the sugar quotient until the theme was closer to “We are not worthy”, than “You’re Invited.” Anne did try to prostrate herself before a senior celeb or two. Perhaps we should be glad she didn’t follow through.

Ribbing and roasting might have tempered the lovies’ love-fest, but the young hosts, perplexingly lacking comedic lines and skits (do we blame Bruce Vilanch after twenty years writing the show?), had to fall back on comments about their clothing, crushes, even their mothers planted in the audience. Only the assignment of ninety-four year old Kirk Douglas to present Best Supporting Actress was marginally more disconcerting than Mr. Franco’s Benny Hill-style cameo as Marilyn Monroe, and Anne’s appearance in a dress that looked for the world like a blue foil-wrapped Cadbury’s Quality Street.

Luckily, there were ladies giving lessons in old world glamour: Helen Mirren in Vivienne Westwood, Annette Bening in Naeem Khan, Marisa Tomei in vintage Lily et Cle 1950 Charles James Couture, Reese Witherspoon in Giorgio Armani Privé, Cate Blanchett in Givenchy Couture, Mila Kunis in Elie Saab, and Gwyneth Paltrow sheathed in a stunning golden Calvin Klein gown. For that, ladies, we thank you.

As Tom Hanks put it, “Hollywood does a lot of events, but it only shuts down for the Oscars.” It takes a special blend of wit and panache to host an event of this magnitude, someone with ascerbic humour and the skill to pull no punches. If the Academy wanted to appeal to the young and the hip with a host with a sharp suit, snarky comments and irreverence, they were barking up the wrong tree. They should have called Ricky Gervais.

Welcome to the Sunshine State

2011-02-24T09:00:00.001-05:00

Winter weather advisories have been popping up on my iPhone every few minutes which would normally send my heart plummeting at the thought of all the snow-blowing, icy roads, and school closings to come. The trouble is, poolside in eighty-degree temperatures, armed with a frosty cocktail, it is truly hard to muster up anything close to a care in the world.

The first time we headed south to Florida with child in tow, it was motivated and financed by a luxury offer dangling several free nights stay and free Sea World tickets as bait in return for attending a two-hour timeshare sales pitch. We were timeshare non-believers and, at a hefty six months into a pregnancy, I could be counted on to provide any number of excuses to get out of there pronto. We listened but didn’t bite, much to the annoyance of the salesman who repeatedly told us he was really an upgrade manager for existing owners and wasn’t normally required to participate in the introductory enticement sessions. We didn’t get a timeshare, but we encountered something else: an epiphany over the unexpected bliss of a family-friendly holiday resort with poolside entertainment, children’s wading pools, and toddler splash fountains. We had arrived feeling quite smug that we’d be impervious to the presentation, ready like Odysseus resisting the Sirens’ song. We didn’t want to fit in; we were simply there because a New York winter had left us desperate for sunshine and a quick break, self-satisfied we’d get something out of the experience though it really wasn’t our cup of tea. How wrong we were. We left full of wonder and in amazement that we could be firmly counted in the family vacation resort demographic. We were believers and effectively at risk.

Bombarded with invitations to come back, (or try Vegas, though that’s hardly the family vacation Mecca), we returned the following year on another golden ticket, willing to sit patiently through another two-hour timeshare spiel. This time we’d have to fight the urge to own having spent a year extolling the virtues of the place, but since we were miraculously paired up with the same pompous salesman who believed pitching was beneath him, it wasn’t hard to resist.

On this trip we had wisely rented a car and although the three-hour wait in the baking sun (after a brutal flight involving two children with ear infections and one vomiting episode), we knew wheels would be our ticket to highway freedom. We balked when the rental company had run out of mid-size SUVs, mid-size cars, or frankly anything capable of handling our bags, strollers and us. Our jaws dropped when we were “upgraded at no extra charge” to a minivan. A minivan? We didn’t want a minivan and here, held hostage, we were being forced into a Dodge Caravan like some renegade car salesman finding a chink in a weakened car shopper’s armour. In addition to test-driving the timeshare experience, we would now be test-driving a minivan, playing at being Caravan owners, without the horror of having to admit to anyone that we’d finally become part of that demographic too. After five days cruising, and I do mean cruising, in our fully loaded comfort suite on wheels, the extent of the rot became clear. I worried all the way home that we’d land and immediately drive to a Dodge dealership to trade in.

This year we were temporarily blocked from a freebie timeshare trip with this company, (they let you try twice but if you don’t drink the Kool-Aid you’re effectively blackballed), but decided a third trip would still work a charm. With a daughter hooked on Princesses and a son gaga over Mickey, we clearly matched the demographics for Disney we’d tried hard to avoid. In fact, meeting so many prime demographics, I wondered whether the Floridian Tourist Industry would have some sort of secret system to single us out for rebates and special offers. Or maybe hospitality staff would have a secret sign to broadcast high-risk sucker alerts.

Scouting around the Internet I found sufficient companies to constitute an entire after-market timeshare industry, all helpfully renting out owner units and weeks. This raised two points: 1.) Clearly there’s an abundance of owners not using their annual timeshare allocations, and 2.) Ergo, why buy when you can just rent from them? I considered calling Mr. Timeshare Upgrade and posing the question to him.

Poolside with our iPhones pinging urgent texts about heavy snows and high winds back home, we starting talking about skipping New York’s brazen winters and traveling south for a few early months of the year. It was sounding like a good idea. Fifteen years ago I’d never heard of a Snowbird, and, having learned it, I’d spent fifteen years being amused by the Oldies seasonal migration to warmer climes. If this is going to be the take-home epiphany of the trip, I can’t let the rot set in. Maybe it’s time to quit the comfy family resort and the cushy minivan, and get back on the wayward road. At least we won’t have to offload either one.

Pass the Princess

2011-02-17T14:09:00.000-05:00

It’s mid-February and I’m bracing myself for the school holidays and our imminent departure for Florida. On one side, it represents the possibility of down time, sunshine, and respite from this winter’s rough manhandling. On the other, specifically where my four year old sits, it represents only one thing: Princesses. With two under fives in tow, the Disneyland experience is largely limited to the saccharine sweetness of the Magic Kingdom, no educational Epcot or movie-inspired MGM Studio visits just yet, (though I’d wouldn’t mind a quick gander at Harry Potter set up myself). And as excitement in the house grows, I can practically feel my blood sugar level peaking at the thought of the Princess gift shop alone.

I wasn’t the original source of the Disney intrusion. Cinderella, Belle, and Ariel came swanning into our home courtesy of pre-school friends, bejeweled birthday cards, and even classroom dolls. Our first Florida break involved Sea World with barely a backwards glance at the shimmering Disney empire in the distance. Now, as with so many parenting pitfalls, I blame myself. I have tried to be fair - imagining all the future therapy sessions that might result from domineering proclamations banning Disney’s eye-batting, simpering beauties. (“My mother wouldn’t let me be the princess I needed to be.”) But striking a balance is a tricky path: Princess dress up is in; a full-blown Princess room makeover is out. Miniature three dollar pocket Disney princesses can be earned; Princess-themed food products are exposed for their insipid marketing ploys. And while my four-year old daughter morphs daily into Ariel, swimming along the floor in her sparkly mermaid dress, my twenty-month old son prefers the sparkly blue Cinderella dress for the same operation. If we’re going down this road at least gender equality can reign.

As parents wrestle with the draw and marketing power of the Disney princess movies, let’s not forget these are fairytales that have been rearing generations of girls around the world for decades, even centuries. Stripped down, they always end with beauty (the gorgeous girl) and good (often including the ability to look beyond shortcomings when it comes to mother-in-laws and men) triumphing over evil, (wicked nemeses, potent spells, and a host of deadly sins) until the girl gets her man and lives happily ever after. Even hard-working Tiana in Disney’s ‘Princess and the Frog’ only deviates from the plot with her career goal but succumbs to the power of love to achieve ultimate happiness. Lesson learned there, Tiana! All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, so all that dogged grit and determination you’re showing will come at a price. No time to date and find that perfect man? Sacre bleu!

Is it any wonder I find myself analyzing our Sunday family time Disney movie – a reward, a concession, and a containment strategy. And should I be surprised by my preschooler puckering up every five minutes in the hope Prince Eric will fall in love with her? By the way, if you want a really hysterical look at some of the curiously inappropriate messages in The Little Mermaid, look up ‘Advice for Young Girls from the Little Mermaid’ on youtube.com. There you’ll be reminded that it’s always helpful to disobey your father, runaway, change yourself for a man, and trade your best asset (in Ariel’s case her voice) for plastic surgery (human legs).

While my children look adoringly at the Princesses, Disney, like so many unrequited love stories, has seen the writing on the wall and moved on. Reports that Disney will not be producing any more Princess movies hinge on their assessment that young girls no longer want to be traditional princesses. Well that can’t be right, except maybe it can if the new idols are stars of Glee and princesses of pop. Disney is banking on the idea that girls still want to be princesses, but not the demure, uncomplaining paragons of virtue and justice, mere damsels in distress. They want to emulate sassy stage divas in the mold of Miley Cyrus, Miranda Cosgrove, and Taylor Swift who helpfully teach that life is really about great hair, lip-gloss, and the pursuit of boys, with enough sugary love songs to push album sales platinum.

Luckily we’ll be in and out of the Magic Kingdom before Disney introduces any American Idol stages or virtual rock star experiences. Right now princess passion just involves dressing up, imaginative play, and live action without posing, pouting, or pre-pubescent crushes. Marauding pirates are just as likely to invade Ariel and Prince Eric’s honeymoon cruise, sharks routinely dispatch Ursula the Sea Witch, and Peter Pan joins Buzz, Woody and Jessie to save the day.

Men in Tights

2011-02-10T09:00:00.004-05:00

Men have long had a thing for Lycra. And I’m not talking about the Pamela Anderson variety, but a cloth cut for their own loins, particularly when the forum for wearing it is public. From early thespians in footed tights to Olympic sportsmen in aqua- and aero-dynamic body suits it has long had appeal. Take Michael Phelps’ merman physique dripping head to toe in shimmery blue, Apollo Ohno’s ungodly thighs bulging in Spandex, Eastern European weight lifters in strappy, candy-coloured, nipple-baring, Lycra lederhosen, or Lance Armstrong's legs pumped into cycling short sausage casings for the Tour de France. And while we’re at it, let’s not forget the fashion preference of every comic book superhero ever invented. If they have a super power, it can only be accessed when dressed in Lycra. In short, the appeal of clothing that arguably doubles as a second skin is as universally appreciated as Sandy’s makeover in skintight stretch satin skinny jeans at the end of ‘Grease’.

With such a long and salubrious history in the sporting annals, surely the pairing of Lycra with the sport of American Football should not come as a surprise. And yet it does. Every Super Bowl, I re-experience the shock of seeing grown – some might say overgrown - linemen jiggling in their shiny uniforms, forming huddles, lining up in formation and grabbing for the ball behind a multitude of shiny Spandex legs. So if you thought Lycra-Spandex was the bastion of European men in skimpy Speedos or that bloke rollerblading around NYC in a pink leotard, think again.

For non-football lovers, much of the game’s appeal is the freedom to ogle and critique the athletes and their unforgiving uniforms from the confines of plush sofas and large dip and chip serving bowls. But for every chiseled Adonis surging down the field to advance the play, we’re faced with a selection of gentlemen who wouldn’t look out of place on a Richard Simmons fitness video. Besides the health risks of hiring from a backlog of aspiring sumo wrestlers for a third of your team, even when you don’t ask them to run very much, surely there’s an immediate threat that one of these linemen might simply flatten the more svelte on either side of the line?

Speaking of ogling Spandex, this year’s Superbowl halved its exposure to flammable fabrics by hosting a final without cheerleaders. Neither the Steelers nor the Green Day Packers have cheerleading teams, or (probably) possess shares in Aquanet or L’Oreal, although judging by the state of Clay Matthews and Troy Polamulu’s competing locks, they’re either prepping for a makeover or stuck in a time warp. Since Slash, Eminem, and Ozzie Osborne all appeared in commercials or half time, they can be forgiven for the latter.

Now let’s talk about tunes. First, Christina Aguilera’s husky pipes started the national anthem on such a lengthy low note I feared the rest of the song would come across like a 45 played on 33 right before her head spun or aliens shot out of her chest. Instead, Ms. Aguilera’s powder white face and hair and day-glo lips (did anyone else think she was channeling Cindi Lauper?) proceded to oversoul every note of every bar of every line of every stanza of the song. You get my drift. However many musical notes are actually written in the score of the national anthem, thousands more were disgorged, multiplying exponentially on the wind. The fact that X-tina has been roundly housed for fluffing up the ramparts line (and I have sympathy here because I simply cannot get the words right either), you have to wonder at what point some sensible official is going to instruct the pre-game warblers to simply stick to the original and cut the Mariah Carey warm-up routine.

With hope in our hearts, we waited anxiously for the half-time musical offering, America’s chance to showcase the pinnacle of talent and entertainment, executed after months of rehearsal with military precision. And then the Grammy award winning, platinum-album-selling quad, The Black Eyed Peas, came out with a gasping mash-up of seven songs relying more on their costume illuminations than a tuning fork. Even with Usher and Slash lending their talent, it felt like an episode of Ouch Factor. If only they’d invited Simon Cowell to give feedback at the end.

Despite the seemingly endless opportunities for sweating dancers encased in light bulbs and Ikea cube lamps to suffer fatal wardrobe malfunctions or facial burns, the only malfunctions were the artists’ vocals and Fergie’s impersonation of Axl Rose complete with wirey dance moves. But take heart. Forsaking Lycra or Spandex, the dancers had been thoughtfully dressed in white stretch PVC costumes for an energetic dance routine (loaded down with wires, bulbs and battery packs – imagine how the TSA handled that at airport security). There, front and center, working double time, one of the aspiring sumo wrestlers had not made the team but had been given an opportunity to get his dance on. With that I saw his future, and that of stretch vinyl uniforms in American football.

Snow Days and Holidays

2011-02-04T09:00:00.000-05:00

If there’s something singular about Americans, it’s that they know how to have a good time. When you head to a summer concert, chances are you’ll be invited to get there early to ‘tailgate’. A quintessentially American tradition of partying in a car park could not be further from any British experience, perhaps with the exception of car boot sales. But since the latter only involves the limited excitement of loading your car with junk to sell, there’s nothing gourmet about that. I doubt I’d even heard of tailgating in Europe so the whole idea of packing a feast – and it truly is that – plus icy coolers stacked with beer was a unique cultural adventure, now safely under my belt after fifteen years of practice.

Televised sporting events are no less exulted. I arrived in the US just two week’s before the 1996 Superbowl and I’m sure this weekend’s will be no less illuminating with ample fodder for next week’s column. By Monday, the nation will be on its knees after a day of fist pumping, whooping and the deleterious over consumption of loaded party nachos, Superbowl confections, and skinfuls of strangely light beer. So props to you, America, for never missing an opportunity to party. But with the yin comes the yang, and here’s where New York, at least, appears to be letting the side down.

Here in the northeast, where we are being bombarded with snow, something’s amiss. New York has the prerequisite mountains and ski slopes to be a skiing destination but you never hear Europeans announcing their ski week plans to arrive here. Perhaps it’s because the après-ski just lacks a certain “je ne sais quoi.” Sure, Vermont, Colorado and California’s Lake Tahoe have it down pat providing a fun scene, picturesque towns playing sparkly host to impressive powder snowfalls and boutiques helpfully relieving skiers of their cash. You see, ski vacationers are just as excited to show off their après-ski style as their off-piste technique. But in New York, it’s all business. The slopes are there for the serious; functional facilities provided cafeteria style. Think vending machines and snack bars, changing rooms rivaling only the local YMCA pool, and row upon row of tables and benches for stripping down wet offspring, post run.

In reality New York slopes are arguably tougher learning terrain than the Alps. I learned to ski fearlessly with copious amounts of Alpine powder snow spraying my mogul turns and cushioning my falls. In New York, I rashly took my confidence down some triple black diamond runs where both it, and I, took a pounding sheering down hard-packed icy runs, trying to etch a groove and ripping my ski salopettes on barely concealed rocks. I returned to base camp black and blue, newly schooled in the knowledge that New York slopes require a different technique. Given, mine may not be aggressive enough for the icy terrain. I’m more comfortable using piles of snow to steel my speed or swoosh to a halt on a dime.

Returning to base camp, I miss a cozy lodge to welcome my bruised up bones. In Courcheval or Val d’Isere, a warming whisky after a night run would warm the cockles of my heart and the rosy-cheeked crowd would unabashedly be there to see and be seen. And that’s my point, there isn’t anything amounting to a European-style après-ski scene at all. Here, the crowds are for the ski lifts, and après-ski amounts to the time it takes to change from salopettes into jeans and sweatshirts, pick up fries and a burger, and trudge back to the car. I’ll venture maybe it’s because most skiers are locals, day-trippers and half-day skiers, not week-long vacationers ready to make an evening of it before starting again. Even where the mountain boasts a lodge it’s closer to a home-style Crackerbarrel with daily specials, or a British Beefeater Inn with a couple of Jagermeister promotion girls thrown in.

Undoubtedly, this year the sheer volume of snowfall has produced bumper skiing conditions. Our four year old is taking ski lessons and I’m gearing up to find my mojo again, content running red runs rather than beating myself up on black. New York skiing may be a bit more common or garden: get there, do it, and go home, without the ritz of Aspen or Vail, but I’ve got to admit there are few places where you can wake up and pick between a dozen mountains – heading north to the Adirondacks, south to the Berkshires - just to ski for the day. And with schools closing for snow days almost weekly, you’re hard pressed to find an excuse. At this rate, my US-born children may get behind on their three Rs, but they’ll be taking New York’s icy slopes by storm.

C is for Cloning

2011-01-27T09:00:00.000-05:00

You know you’re having one of those weeks when your toddler redecorates the wall with sour cream and smashes a light bulb over the printer in one spectacularly destructive half hour. The week gets better when your preschooler wakes her toddler brother to dress him in a Little Mermaid swimming costume at five in the morning. That wouldn’t have been bad had she not decided to remove his nighttime diaper and run screaming into my bedroom shouting furiously that he was getting pooh all over her rug. When any day starts with screams of panic and you leaping out of bed, heart in mouth before you’re technically awake, you can reasonably expect it will not be your finest hour. I’d like to thank Winston Churchill for setting a high bar, and hope he’d cast a forgiving eye, but I dare say the jingle of his red telephone prompted a calmer reaction and more effective game plan than my own histrionics.

These days the idea of being briefly marooned on a desert island is more of a welcome fantasy than a threat, and I could even entertain twenty–four hours in prison isolation if it guaranteed an uninterrupted night and a lie-in. One look at the huge bags under the eyes of most MOLs (Mums of Littles), and you’d think we were toting around luggage sets for a package holiday. And while we happily transport our blissfully unaware, and frequently nocturnal, progeny to playgroups, museums, pre-school and ballet class, their days a continuous flow of order, destination, quiet time and nutritious home cooked meals – all aspirations of my own – it must be orchestrated by harried parents running relay and interference. Work is accomplished in bite-size chunks when little Freddy and Isabella are occupied at morning pre-school or in those precious evening hours between 8pm and midnight. It’s no surprise then that hectic days are fueled with alternating bursts of caffeine, chocolate, and, at least in my case, gobs of cheese. Which would certainly meet the criteria for any desert island wish-list trilogy if I had to come up with three things to take, but limited to words beginning with C.

The other evening, I sat down with my husband to review the months ahead. Every few weeks we invite each other to do some ‘calendaring’ having elevated it to a sport the way some people might schedule a game of tennis. Sometimes I can convince him to plan up to a full year ahead and other times we get hung up on the impracticality of securing a babysitter for something last minute in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. During one such scheduling vortex, he wondered what had happened since the 1950s. I could have quickly donned my pinny, whipped up a heavy-on-aspic dinner, straightened my seamed stockings and beamed, but instead I gawped. He wanted to know how people could have had half a dozen children under five years old, commute, work, prepare home-cooked dinners, attend events, cultivate hobbies, and find time to sleep, all without being held hostage to the whims and availability of The Exulted Babysitter. Impossible domestic ideals cultivated in Woman’s Journal aside, he had a point. Either these people worked like dogs from dusk to dawn or their mothers were strong-armed into moving in and helping out.

Then again, every generation that has ever had it hard invariably responds to lifestyle improvements with a new selection of pressures. I bet the joy of electricity in every home was short lived when people realized they’d have to work ever longer hours. Our obsession with smart phones, internet access and WiFi hot spots is at least balanced out by the reality that you can be reached anywhere night and day and vacation time may just be a euphemism for a change of scenery given the work still churning out of your laptop. Throw in our small world and Nomadic tendencies with friends setting up home in cities across the globe, and you have a clear impediment to getting your mother over to babysit on Friday night.

So, this week when one of the dogs tore open the trash to steal a few diapers, I could have been forgiven for my banshee rant. The fact that the aromatic contents were heartily ground into a new rug could have been good enough reason to put me over the edge. Especially when the futile cleaning efforts only resulted in the rug making it’s way into the nearest rubbish bin. I scrubbed at my toddler’s spilled juice on our bedroom carpet (who in their right mind installs off-white carpet?), soaked my daughter’s paint-daubed sleeves after a hearty morning of pre-school painting, and peeled the spuds for dinner before hurtling out the door to playgroup and ballet. Unable, yet, to clone myself, the babysitter would have to meet me at ballet and take the playgrouper home. And then it dawned on me. This is the future. Pulled between home, work, and the maelstrom of extra-curricular demands, caffeine and chocolate will never be able to keep up. Cloning is the only way! Just as our 1950s foremothers envisioned it.

No Use Crying Over Spilled Wine

2011-01-20T23:59:00.000-05:00

A wonderful overnight stay in the city with a dear friend. What could be greater than a quick escape from Alcatraz (well, my ever-loving household) to indulge in all sorts of girlfriend therapy of the retail, dining and cocktail order. I like to think of it as part of a necessary quarterly exercise to confirm (a.) the ability to show up looking reasonably well put together or within the ballpark of fashion, and (b.) the capacity to agitate brain cells to construct reasonably cohesive conversations, at least something beyond verbatim renditions of The Little Mermaid.

Having reveled in a quick burst of evening shopping like a couple of high school girls unleashed in the big city (I did purchase a questionably youthful dress which my husbanded has unhelpfully described as “cute” and “maybe a bit costumey?”), we went in search of food. Our first pick, HanGawi, a vegetarian Korean restaurant and darling of the 2011 Zagat survey, turned us down flat, and only then did it dawn on me that reservations for a Friday night might have been as critical as a seat reservation on Amtrak. Our second pick, the ever popular BCD Tofu House, took our names with open arms, a hefty wait time and the unwelcome confines of a small bar area packed tighter than a McDonald’s cattle ranch.

The people seated next to us at the bar were young and somewhat chaotic: a couple, a girlfriend and a bleached out train wreck who cracked open an artist’s make-up palette every fifteen minutes to slather greater shimmery swathes of pewter and gold across already caked eyelids. All gesticulating arms and floppy hobo handbag (no Balenciaga here), she knocked a frothing beer bottle down the bar sending her friends backwards in convulsed shock waves before they hastily mopped up the mess.

We, as lovers of red wine, would not be so fortunate. After jumping out of her seat when called to dine, the woman flung her bag upwards from the bar - a pendulum in motion - and launched my companion’s glass into the air like a missile. The spray radius of red wine was impressive, red wine splattering over our laps, boots, coats, my winter cream hat, scarf and a battered designer handbag (bought last year for a tenth of it’s shocking retail price to my thrifty delight), plus the bags of our sleuthful shopping. Now, some accidents deserve graciousness, but for this murder scene I saw red. Among the hoards of guests dressed for dinner on a sociable Friday night, we would be the stained two smelling like a couple of winos. Our horror garnered a reaction from our new acquaintance who, having giggled, “Oops, it was an accident!” was now irked at our annoyance, became belligerent and flounced off.

So this leads me to a genuine question: What should be the correct form for redress in such a awkward situation? While the offender was ushered to her seat, the young couple kindly remained to offer a replacement drink, call for club soda and request cloth napkins to dab at our stained clothes. They even provided an email address to contact them and send a dry cleaning bill. I’m going to admit that’s probably all that could be asked. No self-flagellation with a cat o’ nine tails necessary. In reality, as an accident of carelessness, there was little else that could be done, and certainly I won’t be in touch with the laundry bill, but at only ten years their senior, the whole scene has given me pause for thought.

Please tell me we haven’t reached a point in general civility where we’re presented with platters of attitude where sincere apologies might do. Thank goodness children’s books like ‘Arthur’s Manners Matter’, ‘Please and Thank You are Nice Words’, and other meta-narratives remain enticing enough to wide-eyed preschoolers with their ghastly tales of impudence and consequence to still be among the most requested at our children’s bedtimes. Come on, even in Britain’s Parliament, the deliberate barbs and satirical enquiries made to members during Prime Minister’s Question Time are cocooned in politesse. So perhaps that’s my answer. Instead of freezing her out with withering looks, I should have provided my wine-slinging nemesis with a growth opportunity, asking whether “…the Honorable member from the BCD restaurant bar would care to address the injured parties and provide recompense”. Would it have made a difference? One can only hope.

Beat the Blah with the Letter B

2011-01-13T09:00:00.000-05:00

I was tempted to deviate from Green Acre’s proposed New Year trip down the alphabet by a new study’s exposé of twenty-first century women and their secret desire to marry rich and stay at home. Having resisted the bait, but still marooned on my hypothetical desert island, I bring you more shattering insights into three things of great personal import, all beginning with the letter B.

Several years ago, having failed to recognize a lesser-known Beatles tune, my husband stared at me, truly appalled. It’s possible this faux pas actually rocked his faith that all Brits were born with word-for-word knowledge of The Beatles’ lyrics or some innate insider appreciation of Rubber Soul. Just as I had shocked so many Americans with my hatred of tea, my husband stood before me in denial, apparently having assumed all British babies received their birth certificate and a copy of The Beatles Anthology free of charge on the NHS.

For most Britons, songs like Yellow Submarine and Maxwell’s Silver Hammer are part of the expected roster of songs in any nursery school, despite the deviant connotations of the latter. At five years old I remember singing Lovely Rita Meter Maid, accompanied on guitar by the intimidating and Germanic Mrs. Jarvis, sandwiched in between Ob-La-Di and Ob-La-Da and The Fool on the Hill. At a hip youth church group, we’d sit around singing ‘Norwegian Wood’ and ‘Get Back!’ and doing frankly little else of scriptural relevance. In music class at High School we recreated our own musical version of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, either oblivious to, or giggly at, the LSD reference. Via constant exposure from birth to adulthood, despite my best teen attempts only to listen to Abba, Madonna, The Eurythmics and A-Ha, it appears I absorbed at least 97% of all Beatles songs including lyrics and multi-part harmonies through osmosis. So, as thanks for providing a lifetime mental soundtrack, I’d choose ‘Help’, ‘Rubber Soul’ and ‘Revolver’, three of my favourite Beatles albums, to help pass the time.

Friends just visited our new home bringing traditional Jewish house warming gifts. Bread and salt symbolized their hope we will always have the basics in life, and candles to bring light. All very lovely but they had me at bread. While some people salivate at the prospect of cupcakes and icing, few things can compete with the aroma of freshly baked bread. On walks to school I’d stop to buy a fresh bread roll from the local bakery. After high school, I worked at a high-end antiques store -- the kind where you had to make an appointment or ring the bell to be sized up and let in -- just down the road from a shiny new bakery giving the traditional pasty and bloomers bakery a run for its money. The new shop made these incredible farm animal loaves, pigs and cows, and if I picked one up at lunch time it would be sawn in half, limbs and nose torn off and served up with butter long before day’s end. My paternal grandfather shared my love of bread. In his final days, hospitalized after a heart attack, I remember nurses teasing him about his large tummy. Despite being only eight years old, I piped up proudly that it wasn’t cake tin, it was his breadbasket. Either I’d been playing too much of the board game “Operation” with its curiously labeled body parts, or I perceived physical ownership of a breadbasket as the lesser of two evils. Nonetheless, happiness and buttered bread go hand in hand, and I’d probably get a little grumpy if castaway without the latter.

Getting back to the rules of Desert Island Discs (of course I only employ them when the mood suits), you’re allowed to take one luxury item provided it can’t help you to escape. My final pick under the letter B must be a copy of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’, (assuming they allow me to bring a DVD player onto the island with means for some sort of electrical hook up). If I ever have the sudden urge to become a missionary in the Congo, or explore the world in search of new trade routes and hidden spices, I’m pretty sure I’ll pack ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ in my backpack. This week marks the fifteenth anniversary of my move to America, and about seventeen years since I first watched Ms. Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly peering through Tiffany’s Fifth Avenue window, and fell in love. In one of those odd turns of life, I had been successfully selected for an international placement working for the British luxury goods retailer, ‘Asprey of London’ and was due to move to New York City to work in their Madison Avenue store. Instead, with characteristic insouciance, I decided instead to head to the United States to pursue a Master’s degree in Criminal Justice. I’m not sure who was more surprised, my parents or Asprey’s selection committee. It was a hard decision to explain. Fifteen years later, despite discovering the beauty of upstate New York and falling in love with the majestic Hudson River, ‘Breakfast as Tiffany’s’ preserves my first memories of Manhattan, stepping out vicariously with Holly as a kindred spirit, a little giddy, a little unhinged, but charting a curiously determined course.

New Year, favourite things: Brought to you by the letter A

2011-01-06T09:00:00.000-05:00

Walking out the door on New Year’s Eve, my husband warned me not to try to persuade him to hit any downtown clubs after the midnight toast. Despite an admissible track record of such attempts, this year the suggestion seemed hilarious and preposterous. Thrilled at securing a babysitter for the night - one who had agreeably remembered to show up - it hadn’t escaped my notice that at least some part of me would have liked to curl up on the sofa with a good movie and glass of champagne in hand.

At this point in life, some of my very favourite, and emminently accessible pleasures are family, food, and films. I don’t get out that often so I do spend a good amount of time making, eating or daydreaming about food. And, judging by the number of friends who maintain inspiring food blogs or post delicious photos of culinary creations on Facebook, I’m not alone. Now, around New Year, either in the run up to it or an effort to tame the new arrival, we are besieged by lists: Lists of the past year’s major events, best of, worst of, and who to watch lists, suggested resolutions, and annual round ups of what to hear, read, and eat lists. I’m not immune to the urge to organize – listify, if we fancy coining a new term, so I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and shake Green Acres up a bit with an alphabetized look at some of my favourite things.

I don’t keenly remember listening to Radio 4 Desert Island Discs radio show in the seventies. But as long as I can remember I’ve mulled the question of which pieces of music I’d want while marooned on a desert island. Somehow I thought you could only pick three (it’s actually 8) and over the years the question has crossed into other categories: which three toys, three best friends, three novels, or three foods I couldn’t live without. Thankfully, the list changes frequently which either means I’m fickle or, hopefully, my choices mature with age. (I can’t really see myself taking my three best friends from primary school or a copy of ‘Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret’, even if I was a raging fan of Judy Blume at some desperate point in life.) By contrast, the food list barely changed in three decades: apples, avocados, and sweetcorn. That is, until 2010, when artichokes overtook corn on the cob as a permanent must-have item. So this week’s Green Acres is conveniently brought to you by food groups and the letter A.

Apples, and their affiliation with original sin, seem a propos on the island. They can do no wrong cooked up as stewed apple with Sunday roasts or baked in a crusty pie. For one, apples are mixed up with childhood memories, a three-generation apple peeling operation in our kitchen, my mother and grandmother brandishing sharp knives to skin quartered cooking apples with the same lightening speed I now employ. Then the joy of my mother’s amazing apple snow, a terribly un-PC pudding - probably outlawed in today’s salmonella-fearing world - of pureed apples folded into the foamy peaks of beaten egg whites. Meanwhile, I’ve baked apple strudel, my forte, since Mrs. Haynes’ high school home economics class. Our first three class creations are seared in my mind: pineapple upside-down cake, Mars Bar biscuits, and mincemeat jalousie, but only the jalousie survives in my baking repertoire, the mincemeat swiftly replaced with barely-sweetened, thinly sliced apples. From apples baked in English kitchens to the Polish warm apple dumplings that fueled my student-teacher life in Warsaw, to the blushing apples picking with my own children at our local Love Apple Farm, the humble apple has secured its spot on my desert island.

Avocados have been part of a thirty-year love affair in which they’ve been adoringly chopped, mashed, stuffed, even, unsuccessfully, stir-fried. (With grapefruit of all things. Don’t try it.) Having devoured them as a scoopable, portable snack since I was knee-high to a grass-hopper, I ate them by the bushel with my college flat-mate (until he developed some bizarre allergy that made his lips puff up like collagen implants), and weaned my children on them. I first encountered an avocado at dinner in a farmhouse in the Dordogne, South of France, when I was six years old. Everyone sat down to half an avocado, with just a small pool of French dressing where the stone had been. I was hooked. At every restaurant after that, I would beg for avocado as a starter and a dessert, chocolate cake be damned.

Artichokes entered the scene around the same time as avocados but with starkly different results. The French grandmother and I couldn’t exchange a word (I could only count to twenty in French) but we did go for a few country walks. I’d point out the massive slugs that came out in the rain. She’d mash them with her walking stick. Until I finally decided against the wisdom of showing her any more. She left me in a cemetery, waving me back while she disappeared behind a stone wall. After a while, I followed her, only to see huge black stockinged legs and hitched up skirts. She flapped me away, walked me home, mashing slugs as we went, and steamed an artichoke for me in her kitchen. I didn’t like it. Perhaps scarred from the memory, artichokes didn’t feature as a viable vegetable until last summer when a friend brought me a plate of giant local artichokes. Steamed, dipped in butter, or paired with cheese, I knew artichokes would make the critical cut. So, fresh for 2011 I’m updating my lists.

Empire Vernacular

2010-12-30T09:00:00.000-05:00

I received a wonderful little book this Christmas in the form of a collection of unpublished letters to The Daily Telegraph newspaper in the UK. One letter struck me as so hilarious (though it may just be me) and rather on point for the festive season that I have to share the comments. I can only hope some of the suggestions will stick; I know I’m going to work hard at it. Aptly encapsulating my own years trying to fit into the American workplace with all the right jargon, the complication was in not coming across as too Americanised by the time I’d get on the horn with British brethren back home. As my American colleagues will surely agree, once you drink the Kool-Aid it’s hard to shift gears.

“Sir – I currently work for a wonderful company run by Americans. However, many of my British colleagues are beginning to find their business vernacular rather annoying: Step up to the plate; came in from left field; ball-park figure; circle the wagons; drink the Kool-Aid.
We have taken a different approach to combat its pervasiveness: we have invented our own “Empire vernacular”, which our American “co-workers” will believe is quaint old English idiom.
Here are some examples we use regularly: It’s like trying to find the corner on a bowler hat; we can all sip sherry over this one; to hit the driven grouse (would mean swinging across the line); and I’ll stuff the partridge and get back to you.
Our ultimate hope is that on global conference calls we will one day hear these phrases spoken with an American accent.”

Beyond the roundly hysterical plot to counter the influx of American lexicon, I sympathise with the author’s concerns. Not pain, just low-grade angst at the Borg-like absorption of American phrasiology. You can’t call it linguistic integration since it’s a one-way street with the buck stopping over there. (You can earn a brownie point if you find the three illustrative Americanisms in the last two sentences.) Of course with no formal studies to cite, I’ll apply a decidedly unscientific hunch that the assimilation of casual American phrases went into over-drive (an American automotive term since nary a soul in Europe drives an automatic) over the past five years.

I blame Simon Cowell. As the epitome of trans-Atlantic reality television show flogging, there is barely a variety show shown in the UK that’s not the diabolical twin of a show stateside, if not the American version itself. Surely it’s no coincidence that every movie villain intent on world domination first commandeers the television stations. Propagandists unite! Now, every game show host and overly-tanned Essex-girl is yammering on with a pickle train of American vernacular in spectacular regional dialect.

A week ago, my father, in his early seventies I might add, declared they were “all set” for Christmas. And though I may be partly to blame for his downfall, I nearly fell off the telephone at such an utterance. Through video Skype, I have witnessed my older brother casually trotting out phrases like “I guess so” in place of the British, “I suppose so”. Considering these were the very phrases for which I was ragged on mercilessly after moving to the states -- ones I’d attempt to curb on visits home -- I’m now gobsmacked to hear them peppering far more acute British accents than my long-ago tempered own.

The topic came up at a Christmas cocktail party where a couple of Anglophiles asked me earnestly whether it wasn’t terribly, terribly, hard raising the fruits of my loin in a foreign culture. I may have described my Henry Higgin-style elocution plans with a little too much wine-infused gusto but they no doubt quickly caught the gist. Imparting urgency to any four year old in the matter of letter pronunciation, especially double tees, is hard, but consistently teaching British and American versions for commonly used words requires the same diligence as raising a bilingual child. Now with my countrymen muddying the water with hybrid Anglo-American turns of phrase, I don’t know whether to accept the merger or throw up my hands in despair. If you have thoughts on exercising the newly minted ‘Empire vernacular’, please consider stuffing the partridge and getting back to me.

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>> “I Could Go On…Unpublished Letters to the Daily Telegraph” was edited by Iain Hollingshead and published by Aurum Press Ltd., UK (2010).

Santa, Baby

2010-12-23T09:00:00.001-05:00

‘Tis the season to be jolly and some people take the business of festive decorating rather seriously. In any American neighbourhood there are always two or three houses vying with one another for the title of Greatest Nightly Drain on the National Grid, their exteriors glittering with a storm of light bulbs to rival the illuminations of the Eiffel Tower and Harrods. Unquestionably, craftsmanship and diligence go into these creations, no doubt with great satisfaction at the end. Perhaps that explains the recent success of a viral hoax about a fired department store Father Christmas who found a way to express his feelings to Harrods’ top brass. Ostensibly, he barricaded himself in the control room and rearranged the store’s exterior lights to spell out an enormous expletive. Who can't relate?

On any given morning, I am struck by the strange sight of dozens of deflated Santas and snowmen collapsed on lawns. It lends a curious sort of ‘morning after’ feel to the drive as though you are witnessing the aftermath of some debauchery. Even when someone flicks the switch to re-inflate them, it takes a few minutes during which time they prop themselves up rubbing sore limbs and achy heads.

As soon as December hits, my hopes for the festive season kick into overdrive. It’s my chance to indulge some inner magpie with all things shiny and glittery, not to mention Christmas parties where we are finally allowed to dress up. Moving house in the beginning of December put a significant crimp in my organization. The well-oiled Christmas card assembly line ground to a halt despite ordering cards weeks in advance; plans to purchase a Christmas tree hit the backburner; and tracking down Christmas presents barely entered the equation.

We moved house on a Saturday, partially unpacked on Sunday, and hit the ground running. School was still in session, meals needed to be cooked, clothes located. Unpacking the kitchen was priority number 1, as the nerve center for all home operations, and reassembling the children’s rooms was priority number 2. Since everything else was proportionately optional, we, the parents, have managed to appear spectacularly disheveled and I can’t help but wonder what people make of the new residents in their neighbourhood.

Given the never-ending stream of workmen and visitors a new move attracts, we decided in our infinite wisdom to tack on a trip to Ikea for rugs. Nearly two hours away, this sort of trip would, in the UK, be like going on vacation. Having packed up children, supplies, and a U-Haul tow, we took our lives in our hands and headed into New Jersey. To Ikea. On a weekend. Right before Christmas. In terms of bright ideas, this one ranks pretty low. If you’ve ever been on a quest for Christmas spirit, this is not where you’ll find it. From crazed parents to screaming children, we fitted the mold and joined forces with hordes of families who either thought Ikea was the perfect destination for Christmas gifts, had moved house like us, or just had a thing for Swedish meatballs. The place was heaving, shopping carts battling one another for space in cute little display areas. I actually thought the ground was moving in the marketplace and people routinely attempted to filch our flat shopping cart as we attempted to locate furniture boxes in the picked over stockroom. Our children departed from any sense of patience and understanding with our four year old alternating between tears and demands for food while our 18 month old screamed for most of the 4-hour ordeal.

Despite our disarray, we’ve been trying mightily to get festive. We adorned the Christmas tree with twinkly lights and piped Christmas tunes around the house. I burned up my laptop ordering gifts from Amazon.com and ragged on the post office to speed up our mail forwarding since we’d barely received a Christmas card. The array of visitors coming to see our house and chaos brought it’s own share of headaches. Several noticed our Elf on the Shelf (named ‘Small Paul’) and wanted to talk about where we had bought this year’s hot trend, when we all know that he is an envoy of Santa, like a secular mass-produced prophet, and certainly not cheap, commercial merchandise.

Since Mother Nature has been dumping most of our snowfall on Europe, I have been spared daily snow outings although we did squeeze in a snowball fight and a family walk through the woods. Of course, the children complained royally about the cold and we were back inside within fifteen minutes, but the effort was there. With just a couple of days to spare I am finally back at my desk attempting to churn out the Christmas cards and cover all gift-giving bases. I look tired, haggard, and haven’t shaved my legs in over a week. But, who cares about such things. We will be ready for Christmas, the gastronomic overload and the post-holiday clear up. I can only hope Santa will bring me some earplugs and a good night’s sleep.

Speed of Life

2010-12-16T09:00:00.001-05:00

In recent weeks, almost every conversation has started or ended with a comment over how quickly 2010 zipped by. Arguably, with the year drawing to a close it might be inevitable that we’d share some collective John Lennon-style reflection on the arrival of Christmas and musing over what we actually did in the past year. Nonetheless, the frequency with which this conversation seems to crop up among my peers leads me to one conclusion: our disproportionate marveling is indisputable proof that we are turning into old biddies. You flat out never hear a twenty-something wondering where the year went. Yet here we are assuming a time honored elder tradition where entire conversations can be dedicated to time, traffic, or weather.

There is truth to that sense of life speeding up. Recent years have become less about me (altough I vaguely remember those balmy ones where I only had myself to worry about) and have evolved into some complex nerve center orchestration and integration of competing family member schedules, sending batches of weeks skittering to the curb. In hindsight, it appears to have induced a form of amnesia. No sooner than our pre-schooler was out for the summer holidays, I was throwing a turkey in the oven for Thanksgiving with barely a rustle of the calendar. I shouldn’t be surprised. Even when we retire to bed the ability to disconnect is hard. With smart phones and social media at our fingertips, we’re paying bills, responding to messages from school, and tapping goodnight to friends in one time zone or waking up to news from another, all without kicking off the covers.

In some ways, while we’ve all been avidly streamlining our possessions, reducing waste and saving the planet, we have inadvertently replaced physical clutter with mental clutter; millions of us rushing around like tiny headless Energizer bunnies on call or over-committed night and day. When you’re operationally hectic, a little more seems like adding spice to the mix, since we may be losing the ability to sense over-load. Consider this: On October 22nd 2010, two days before our daughter’s fourth birthday party I texted my husband about a house I had seen online. Not that we were looking, having spent the better part of two years working diligently on home improvement projects of our own. Within four days we had seen a different house and arranged a viewing. Within three weeks we had agreed on price, and last weekend we moved in. So what if there were Thanksgiving guests, an anniversary trip, and Christmas gigs for my husband’s band on top of the purging, packing, and Christmas rush? If you’re counting, which I am, that was seven weeks from start to finish. At least it explains why I feel a decade older than I did this summer and justifies the day-dreamy allure of making Christmas dinner a takeout this year.

During the move I found a piece of paper folded and pinned to my office notice board. It was a detailed chart featuring the five-year plan my husband and I had created over beers at Chatham’s Peint o Gwrw pub in 2005. Now, as 2010 and the five year period come to a close, I couldn’t help but review the goals, (even though I’d neglected the plan), just to see how we’d fared. Created soon after our honeymoon, the plan naturally pre-dated much of our life today. Goals to have children, start businesses, support charities, and prioritize time at home were met, while intentions to exercise, get more sleep and generally slow down clearly were not. I was struck by a final goal, scheduled for Year Five, which proposed moving house with a string of question marks. I have no idea what underpinned that idea but clearly there was a fledgling thought germinating. And while we may not have accomplished all things at the speed of light, as this year ends I’m giving a knowing nod to the speed of life.

Bah Humbug

2010-12-02T09:00:00.000-05:00

For today’s sacrificial act, I share my guilty pleasure of in-car Christmas radio. More efficient at procuring sneers and open disdain than a twenty year old’s public protestation of love for Oldies radio, it’s something I tend to keep under wraps. More damningly, this year I succumbed to intermittent radio blasts as early as November 4th when I stumbled upon a twenty-four hour festive station that could melt the stripes off a candy cane faster than a quick roast of Joan of Arc at the stake.

True, it has been more difficult to resist this festive urge than establishing limits for my daily chocolate intake or Pavlovian Facebook habit. More than a few of my friends will no doubt snort – Christmas radio! - and point to the higher power of academic NPR broadcasts or lament the commercialized lows of Christmas excess. But they should brace themselves. A few merry bursts of pre-Christmas jingle can be critical inoculation against the syrupy tide that will flow over the next few weeks as malls turn up the sticky sugar cookie and vanilla quotient for a Bon Jovi style final countdown.

Naturally, there are those who really do wish the Christmas spirit of year-end parties, and all the glitter, sparkle and industrious elves would just go away. I might venture these individuals should probably not be gainfully employed in large box superstores at this time of year, mostly for their own good. If the racks of fake garland don’t get them, the diligent Salvation Army bell ringers will.

I made a perilous visit into one such store - my most hated of them all - in a last ditch effort to ferret out a particular toy that had sold out in the Black Friday sales. I was also looking for an elf. You wouldn’t think elves would be so hard to come by at this time of year. Having corned the market, Pottery Barn has already sold out of Santa’s ‘Elf on the Shelf, a box set featuring a lanky little elf (also a bit of a snoop and a tattle-tale) who reports nightly to Santa on whatever he has seen. In my infinite wisdom I thought I’d just find a little elf and hide him around the house for the same effect, but locating the elf was the hard part.

Eccho, a reluctant sales associate and not a people person, works at this big box store. Almost concave, he appears to have had the Christmas stuffing knocked out of him, gliding like a sad ghost forced to forever tread the silver bauble and fairy light aisles. Still, restocking row upon glittery silver row, he looked like a man who might know his festive ware and so I stood myself before him with a simple question.

“I’m looking for an elf.”
“An elf…” he trailed off, gingerly fingering the hooks of some gingerbread trees. “An elf. Well, you see, I don’t know what that is.”

Considering the probability of meeting a shop assistant assigned to the Christmas section who has never heard of an elf, I decided to be helpful. “Yes, an elf. You know, they sort of help out by making toys for Santa. At Christmas.”

Eccho, it turned out, wasn’t particularly interested in the role of elves at secular Christmas or any other time. He looked up to the ceiling before wafting his arms around ethereally without the slightest hint of urgency before offering, “Why don’t you just, you know, look around.” Having waved me away, Eccho and his watery eyes simply went back to tranquil shelf stocking.

It’s well documented that I’m typically persistent in securing shopping satisfaction but Eccho appeared so successfully impervious to the piped Christmas music and the festive assault on his five senses so I left him alone. The next assistant was less fortunate as I insisted she find a computer to find out if they sold any sort of elf in any form in the entire store. Despite elves peering out from sale boards and roll-back value placards, the answer was no.

Leaving the store, I was now the antithesis of the Christmas spirit: aggravated, irked, and tired of the milling crowds. Just as the sliding doors were about to deliver freedom, a man in front started coughing uncontrollably, hacking away and finally bending over to spit out some terrible slop right at my feet. I fled, elf-less but clutching my boxed toy, hyperventilating with the conviction I had just been exposed to TB. As I started up my car, the dulcet tones of George Michael’s Last Christmas wafted over the airwaves, with Christmas radio at the ready to deliver me from evil and banish the Grinch.

Stir It Up

2010-11-25T09:00:00.000-05:00

Well, Anglo-gourmands, if you didn’t know, this past Sunday was Stir-Up Sunday. Not a reason to channel your inner Bob Marley, (though any day is a good day to try). In the UK, Stir-up Sunday comes pre-loaded with booze, fruit, suet, and tradition as the last Sunday before Advent when we prepare our Christmas cakes and mince pies to give it all ample time to mature. I love the idea that right as we’re bearing down on the whole madhouse that is Christmas, especially today’s commercial, social, festive frenzy, we should put on the brakes, don our domestic hats and pulverize dry fruit.

I do have wonderful childhood memories of making Christmas cakes with my mother from scratch. We’d carefully roll out a smooth marzipan mantle to drape over the Christmas cake, beat icing into stiff peaks, press tiny silver baubles into place, and compose miniature scenes with quirky Christmas figurines year after year. And when that was done, we’d brine and bread a huge ham for Boxing Day. I can’t remember if we made our plum puddings but I know they took hours to steam in their cheesecloth wraps. Who knows, we probably whipped up mini soufflés for tea and shook up the perfect martini in our kitchen pinnies.

The tradition of Stir-up Sunday may be something of a dinosaur to the masses but, in the states, the proximity of Thanksgiving to Christmas – with just four short weeks in between – does a good job of getting the ball rolling. Thanksgiving is all about the little things: about taking time to prepare a home-cooked feast, try out new twists on traditional recipes, and produce gargantuan quantities to feed on demand to households of family and friends.

I view Stir-up Sunday as a sneaky chance to test-drive a mini version of the T-Day spread and get a head start on the plates of cookies I’ll be called on to produce for a host of mandatory cookie swaps. This weekend things were decidedly busy in our house but I was determined to try. Cheating just a little, I bought a trussed, seasoned, ready to roast chicken that any living thing with opposable thumbs could cook. On Sunday morning, it still felt important to bake so I busted out a Nigella Lawson scone mix, an excuse for pre-measured flour, salt and sugar. Add butter and milk and - voila! – freshly-baked scones. My father-in-law has a weak spot for old fashioned mince pies so I decided to make those too. Only let’s say I bought my pastry and used imported jars of British mincemeat. They still look pretty but let’s stay mum about the shortcuts.

Thanksgiving is my favourite adopted American holiday, one I can literally get my chops into. It’s beauty lies in the fact that there’s a whole lot of eating, plenty of booze (eggnog!) and absolutely no presents. Despite being steeped in the very earliest of American history, it seems decidedly atypical of the advertising industry to actively promote home-cooking and unabashed gluttony with virtually no knock-on commercial benefit outside the farm or supermarket. It doesn’t seem as though the new selection of Thanksgiving greeting cards has really taken root and, being sandwiched between Halloween and the winter holidays, there’s no demand for Pilgrim costumes or seasonal gift wrap.

Despite the season, a friend announced she had made the decision to give up coffee and wine. The very idea made me shudder. Coffee and wine are two of my absolute favourite things happily marking the start and end of my day, caffeine and tannins be damned. And since Thanksgiving is a time of to name all the things for which you’re thankful, I realized mine are all things that bring me daily happiness and joy. While I’m thankful for my coffee and wine, I’m also thankful for our perpetually well-stocked pantry so that I can create ever more complex dinners, even when my dining companions are often 4 and 1 years old. I’m especially thankful for our new boiler produces piping hot, steamy showers to rival any Old Spice ad. And I’m thankful for my chaotic household that can make me laugh and feel utterly crazed all at the same time.

If, like me, you didn’t quite get to grips with your cookies and pies from scratch on Stir-up Sunday, worry not. When you’re sitting around your turkey, or tofurkey, be grateful for a guilt-free holiday season and give thanks for the stable of celebrity cooks that are bound to see us through.

What Goes Around

2010-11-18T09:00:00.000-05:00

I tried to remind my husband of the times when we would spend relaxing evenings eating unhurried dinners and listening to jazz. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “No we didn’t.” Actually he remains totally defiant about this despite my protestations. His selective amnesia of this chapter in our newly married, pre-kids life is utterly inconceivable to me since I’m the one who still occasionally daydreams about it. He, on the other hand, is getting plenty of mileage out of the exchange with nightly suggestions that we should calmly swirl our wine and nod along to a little Count Basie while the children put themselves to bed. Or maybe we could refer to each other as Cat. Or just snap our fingers when we really dig something.

Mockery aside, there’s a valid point in how easily we forget. Four years ago I was in training for a marathon, running and writing about the road-kill I encountered on the pretty roads of Columbia County, (curiously including plagues of orange snails and a deceased porcupine). Now, a couple of training injuries and children later, I’m on the school run – the safe, vehicular variety – somehow being talked into an overnight relay road race from New Haven, Connecticut to Boston. That’s some 200 miles. Training starts from scratch with a ‘Couch to 5K’ game plan. Day 1 and I’m up with the birds to tuck a gentle run under my belt but as it goes smoothly I run 3.5 miles. It’s not a big deal until the next day when my legs are fine but my hips are screaming. The march to forty isn’t doing me any favours.

Meanwhile, I made plans for a rare date night, managing to nab a seasoned sitter willing to stay until midnight to fuel our dinner and movie plans. Dinner was superb, but these days a large satisfying dinner translates swiftly into a food coma with the efficiency of a turkey’s tryptophan. If I had thought we’d be up until bewitching hour, only two hours into date night we were practically falling asleep on the table, bagging the movie and killing time to avoid facing the babysitter.

That’s alright, there’s been a lot of water under the bridge in the last decade or two. Practically a tsunami. So what if I can barely stay awake to watch the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve or the prospect of pulling an all-nighter clubbing makes me feel quesy? Believe me, I occasionally get invitations from friends willing and able to relive some of the debauchery of a decade ago. But even when I’m willing, clearly I am not able.

Over the past few days, rumours have been swirling wildly about a British royal wedding, all finally confirmed by Clarence House and St. James’ Palace on Tuesday morning. As exciting as Will and Kate’s impending nuptials might be, my brain made an instant leap back to 1981 and the perfect royal wedding of Diana and Charles. The wedding ruled those school days, every detail from the design duo making the dress to the china mugs and plates featuring disembodied, betrothed, royal heads. I mentioned it to our babysitter who shrugged her shoulders. Born in 1983, she’s about as connected to Lady Di’s wedding day, and marital woes, as World War II.

Despite Prince William’s fiercely protectionist stance against privacy and media invasions, the media is also a different beast in 2010. If people were drinking up every tidbit of royal matrimony in 1981, we already know today’s insatiable thirst for insider scoop, salacious or sweet. Setting a 21st century tone, the Queen tweeted official royal delight at the engagement news. Now, if the Queen is tweeting, can we expect Will to keep things modern with a reality show as they prepare for the big day? Conveniently ‘Will and Kate’ already has the ring of ‘Will and Grace’ or ‘Jon and Kate Plus 8’. Luckily the recipe for a newly-engageds reality show has already been test-driven by Carmen Electra and Dave Navarro, while a newly-wed version was proudly played out by Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey. We can all breathe a big sigh of relief there. Of course, the spectacular demise of all those televised unions makes a compelling case for keeping the media at bay. But in a depressed economy even Prime Minister David Cameron couldn’t help hailing the news “as a great thing for the country.” No doubt he’s hoping it’ll deflect some media attention from the Coalition government and stimulate a shiny silver lining for retailers too.

Fashion or Fiction

2010-11-11T09:00:00.001-05:00

I recently returned from a very civilized trip into the city to see the ballet. Admittedly, it was the dance-theatre all-male version, where the swans forsake tutus for naked torsos and feathered legs, but a striking performance nonetheless. Traveling in by train, I arrived dressed for the evening despite the rather chilly temps. It didn’t help my cause that I had an invitation, a command performance, to a seventies-themed party beforehand. It can be hard to cross breed seventies attire and an evening ballet but I came up with a vaguely retro color-block mini-dress in shades of grey and black. I thought it looked cute and mod paired with long, flat boots but still there was the worry of looking like mutton dressed as lamb.

I had a little time to kill (or maybe I deliberately caught an early train) and hightailed it to one of my favourite shops only to find my eighties wardrobe had thrown up in it. I’ve already mentioned my anxiety about eighties fashion so now I could face the fear in all its glory with shoulder pads, slouchy cardigans, tweedy skirts, fake fur upon fake fur, and other crimes of moral turpitude. Not so much over what I could wear as whether I should. Thanks to a magpie attraction to clothes, I braved chaotic changing room lines (raising the general question as to why NYC high street stores are always so unappetizingly trashed) to try on a particularly hairy sleeveless jacket similar to one I wore to death when I was about nineteen. I loved it. But recognizing I used to pair it with Portuguese-designer glow-in-the-club soled platform boots decorated with water-filled plastic pods, I wrestled it back on the hanger.

I’m not the only one facing a malfunctioning wardrobe. At four years old, my daughter has found her voice over what she likes to wear and it frequently includes any number of outfits from her dress up box, or the alarming stockpile of necklaces and Mardi Gras beads fit for Mr. T. She has a passion for princesses, which may have been as unavoidable as the gender-splitting preference for pink. And we are typically roped into fairy tale re-enactments despite the gruesome fate of many characters along the way. However, to the curiosity of some of my friends, I’ve put a public kabosh on the whole make up and nails thing. With one single reason: she’s 4 years old. Cute as it may be to see little girls dressing up, I have a pet aversion to tiny made up faces and chipped nail polish on pre-school fingernails. Perhaps it’s too reminiscent of Jon-Benet Ramsey beauty pageantry or as depressing as mall-walking tweens in lipstick and stilettos, but mine’s a visceral reaction. Give me fingernails grimy with mud from bug hunts or sticky with paint from Pollock experiments any day.

So, here’s the rub. While movies and stores gang up with pretty girl product placement – (have you seen the new glossy Barbie line with a prêt-a-porter wardrobe entirely in black?) - I’m been trying to let my daughter’s imagination run wild with glittery princesses while running interference against gobs of sparkly lip gloss and candy-scented peel off nail polish. Toy Story’s ‘Jessie’ rode into town as the antidote and her cowgirl antics have shaken up the daily dress up landscape so the princesses are now forced to hitch up their skirts and behave in quite an unladylike way.

While hunting for a Jessie duvet cover, I found Disney had clearly drawn a line in the marketing sand with blue Toy Story bedding for boys and pink Princess sets for girls. If you reject princesses you get Barbies or Hello Kitty, but nothing in the way of action heroines. Luckily for me, Disney Europe took a slightly different approach finding it worthwhile to market a pink duvet cover with a giant sassy Jessie with a lasso and jaunty cowgirl hat. Come birthday time, we were golden.

This weekend we trotted off to see ‘Cinderella Tales’, an interpretive trio of Cinderella tales from around the world. European Cinderella stayed true to form outsmarting her stepsisters to secure the man of her dreams and a happy ever after, while Egyptian Cinderella was similarly plucked from obscurity to be the Pharaoh’s Queen. Curiously, the Irish twist involved a prince, a dragon, a death and a magic bull’s tail but it was this version that had to be re-enacted all the way home. So I could not have been more gratified when my pint-sized Cinderella had an epiphany. “You know, Mummy, princesses don’t really do anything. They look pretty but Jessie can ride a horse, lasso a bull, and do gymnastics.” I think she makes an excellent point.

No Fun in the Medical Biz

2010-11-04T09:00:00.000-04:00

Let’s talk about front of house staff in doctor’s offices. Actually, pretty much any medical office staff that don’t technically perform a treatment function. And while I don’t really want to naff anyone off or grossly generalize the hard working people of the United States myriad medical offices (though I probably will), my question boils down to this: What’s the problem?

The first hint that something might be up is usually an assortment of handmade signs colorfully, if silently, barking orders. Clearly the authors and artists are frustrated. And definitely tired of repeating themselves. Sometimes the signs mirror those at airport immigration with the curt but instructive, “Wait Behind the Line”. Others pre-empt your seemingly harmless, quick question with some version of “Do not interrupt the receptionist. Someone will be with you when they are ready.” More confusing are signs with multiple arrows pointing “Exit this way. No, not that way. Through here.” At an imaging center last week I came out from my little room only to find myself as lost as Hansel and Gretel trying to choose a path out of the forest. I don’t know who designs medical offices but for some reason it’s frequently unclear which way is out. Frankly I marvel that the doctors ever manage to find their patients. On more than one occasion, I’ve peeked out the door - after being left alone semi-naked for nearly thirty minutes – just to make sure everyone hasn’t gone home.

The trouble is you’re usually sick or concerned or maybe even pregnant when you show up at these offices and, I suspect, we’re all hoping for a little sensitive treatment. On the flip side, the medical receptionists have to deal with all these sick, concerned, waddling people coughing, crying and questioning them all day long. So perhaps that’s the root of their extraordinary lack of sympathy and the utter malaise that permeates the air. Few things tick me off as much as having to stand at a counter, anywhere, while the huddle of staff carry on personal conversations about little Toby’s funny comment or the jerk who sold them their coffee that morning. But stand there you do, sort of smiling, sort of looking expectantly, until they gaze up at you with irritation as though your arrival has created an imbalance in the natural order. And while you continue to irk them with your snotty presence or bothersome questions, they shove a clipboard at you and tell you to come back. Woe betide if you forget your insurance card. Though they have photocopied it at every prior visit, you will need to know all the information or expect to cough up green backs.

Possibly the clipboard is the real source of the problem. Take today: a medical receptionist chose a flight attendant approach, rattling off her clipboard spiel at great speed and in monotone. Before she could finish, the woman next to her began an identical recitation so it sounded like they were singing a nursery rhyme in rounds. I thought about joining in and seeing if we could keep the loop going, but no one seemed to be smiling and there were an awful lot of those handmade signs plastered all over the glass. I read them and sat down.

The blood lab was no friendlier. I am a complete disaster when it comes to blood work but I can manage to get myself in the door and announce my fears. At my appointed lab, I was stopped in my tracks by the hand drawn signs that were all very specific. I was not to stick my head in the door and call out to the technician. I was not to call out at all. I was not to step into the room. I was not to disturb the receptionist who sat with her back to the glass eating her lunch. And I was not to use my cell phone. In fact, I was to remain outside the door, silently, not on my phone, and someone would come out when they were ready. This was all well and good except, in the absence of visible staff, how on earth was anyone going to find me?

I shall never forget having to switch obstetrical practices at 36 weeks into my pregnancy. I showed up to my first appointment seven minutes late and after queuing for a while reached check-in sixteen minutes late. The medical receptionist looked at the clock, said nothing, and simply pointed to the hand-made sign on the glass: ‘Patients arriving more than fifteen minutes after their appointment time will not be seen.’ Despite my remonstrations and tears, she remained implacable, clearly unmoved by my largesse or the prospect that I might have a baby in front of her. In retrospect, I’m mildly impressed at her resolve to uphold the office laws, even though a nurse did come to my slightly hysterical rescue. I’m guessing these staff perform a similar function to bouncers and security guards, acting as a buffer between the rock stars (doctors) and their adoring fans (patients). Despite their misleadingly festive sweaters and office décor, it’s pretty clear they are not fond of us, the sick and dejected. It’s either that or there is just no fun in the medical biz.

For Eighties Sake

2010-10-28T09:00:00.000-04:00

Hell hath frozen over and I am embracing eighties fashion. A girlfriend met me in a cute top with – wait for it – sewn in shoulder pads. I, no less culpable, was sporting ploofy leg of lamb sleeves on my cardigan. Sure, just a touch here and there but clearly an eighties infection nonetheless.

The real trouble is that I lived through eighties fashion the first time around. And by that, I mean I was a teen in the eighties which places me squarely in the eye of the storm, at the perfect confluence of eighties music, fashion and big hair. I was always lead to believe fashion re-trends every thirty years so here I am, at the completion of a full fashion cycle, slightly perturbed at going through it all again. More specifically, in a sort of déjà-vu way, I’m finding myself drawn to the same things I coveted at thirteen. Suddenly the fashion faux-pas of yesterday are resurfacing like fat from gravy: bat wing tops, sequin shoulders, slouchy suede boots and giant slumpy bags, and all perversely sounding like a good idea.

So what if I picked up a puffball skirt when they popped up last year? Or that the shoulders of my favourite top are decorated with sequins? At least I managed to maintain my anti-ra-ra skirt stance. Having refused them in the eighties, I can refuse them today. Unless you are a pencil or a supermodel, willfully wrapping horizontal ruffles around your lower body should be avoided by about 98 per cent of the female population.

On the other hand, the eighties gave us flattering high-waisted, wide-legged, nautically-inspired trousers; boxy, military-inspired jackets; and an abundance of decorated epaulettes that would make any general proud. Of course, I have more troubling memories of getting into my underwear and tucking flesh-toned shoulder pads under bra straps like some sort of linebacker padding. It stands to reason that broadened shoulders provide an illusory service in shrinking waistlines so it’s a wonder the plastic surgery industry didn’t develop some sort of shoulder insert like those peculiar buttock implants for people with J-Lo envy.

A quick check of the season’s trends proves the eighties has officially dug its claws in. Moving on from the ra-ra skirts, day-glo stilettos and harem trousers I scoffed at last year, it’s full speed ahead into chunky cable knits, sweater dresses and knee high boots. I vividly remember poring over a copy of eighties Vogue where my teen self had circled a belted cream cable-knit sweater dress, and saved up for an Isle of Aran knit version. Not so surprisingly, I already have an Aran jumper on order for my four-year old.

Celebrities are jumping on the bandwagon. Kim Kardashian was out there trying to impress New York with striking golden shoulder pads during Fashion Week, and Katy Perry, a mere mewling infant back in 1984, seems to be experimenting with backless sequined knit-tops as day wear. I almost want to warn them that the eighties is like the Ouija board – from dabbling with things they don’t understand, dire things can come - but for the most part people seem to have backed away from the tragic lessons of excessively large hair, harsh pink blush, and crimping irons. And even if they don’t realize enormous slouchy handbags were designed to accommodate extra large canisters of ozone-eating aerosol hairspray (way before we’d ever heard of CFCs), the love of sack-like bags is being rekindled again.

In for a penny, in for a pound. If the eighties has come this far back into fashion, there’s no avoiding its influence elsewhere. If you can step back from the current love affair with The Avett Brothers, you’ll find synthesizers creeping in on chart music, and shops stocking the kind of bright plastic bracelets, (like coiled cords from old household telephones), that we used to stack in multiples up our arms. Today’s breaking news that Sony will cease production of the Walkman cassette player will surely only cement the desire for that ubiquitous symbol of the eighties. (I’m groaning I ever sold mine for a song.) As long as we don’t have to endure Snood Hoods or fluffy neon socks as fashion wear we should be alright, but, with fingerless gloves on the shelves in every store, I’m going to bet the eighties isn’t done with us yet.

What Happens In Vegas

2010-10-21T09:00:00.002-04:00

I had every intention of submitting only seven words for this week’s column: What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas. I’m still sitting here roundly amused at the prospect and imagining my editor’s face pondering whether to run a nearly blank column or fill the remaining 693 words. I’m forced to abandon the plan.

We’re back fresh as roadside daisies from a little trip to Las Vegas. Sin City. No children. In fact, it was our first childfree getaway in four years and we were feeling smug about it. Alas, despite the best laid plans of mice and men, nothing could stop a twenty-four hour bug from slaying us, (and when I say us that includes the generous friends taking on our children for the weekend), just one day before the trip. And though we were soon better and spared an embarrassing flight, we were in no shape to party like rock-stars.

In fact, you might call the trip pious. We were the epitome of virtue, early to bed and early to rise; though the little trips to the smoky casino made us neither healthy, nor wealthy, nor wise. No matter. This trip wasn’t about ribaldry and revelry. It was about plush beds and sleep, without interruptions in the night or toddlers creeping undercover. And it was about food. Great decadent plates of mouthwatering gourmet creations washed down with lashings of fabulous wine. Instead, on the heels of our debilitating illness, I was left with the food fussiness of a picky teen. Normally able to eat my own body weight in smoked salmon and shellfish, I could only push the shrimp around my plate and quaff great glasses of water while my dining companions sopped up spiked cocktails with gargantuan slabs of Brazilian barbecue.

Robbed of my appetite, I hit the spa. Spa services should be written into any healthcare reform package as critical care for sleep-deprived parents. I was feeling pretty suave dropping my terry-toweling robe, slipping into the hot tub, and sipping aqua with a girlfriend. At least I was until, summoned for my massage, I mistakenly took a submerged step for terra firma and fell unceremoniously into the center of the hot tub with a plop that sounded like a cement block. All the lounging ladies jumped and stared while the masseuse glared at me for alarming the languorously unstressed.

While I was receiving the services of one kind of pro, my other half was being reeled in by another. An impeccably dressed woman of the oldest profession greeted him enthusiastically in the casino in the guise of a long lost friend. When he realized her ploy she let him off with a laconic, “OK, honey, off you go.” Vegas can be a confusing place when the ladies of the night are more smartly dressed than the party girls out on the town. Another strike on the side of piety, and a sign of our maturing age, we could only gawk at the girls in five-inch heels and skirts barely covering their assets.

Least life become too unbearably soft over the weekend, my brain ejected me from coveted sleep at 5:30am each morning. It didn’t really matter whether we were in bed at 2am (first night excitement) or 11:00pm (every night after that); the old gray matter had jobs for me to plan and critical thinking to do. Raising the bar on the piety scale, you cannot imagine my unbridled pleasure from three pristine, uninterrupted hours between five and eight in the morning. Perhaps my brain was just fired up with the extra shot of sleep and inspired by entire mealtimes of engaging adult talk.

Why come home refreshed and rejuvenated when you can hop a couple of red eyes, skip a night’s sleep altogether, (except for the little nap in Chicago airport where you simply pass out over the steel armrest of the gate chairs), and arrive home early enough in the morning to race back and reunite as a family? Well, of course we chose that option and were in our collective pyjamas by 2pm. Our traveling companions call this ‘Jampers Lockdown’: a mandatory ejection of all (intruders) visitors, compulsory donning of nighttime clothes, and a group huddle in front of bad TV. Close to actual delirium we managed to squash ourselves onto the sofa for a cartoon Disney movie that provided both the opportunity for family time and the chance to drift in and out of semi-consciousness.

On Monday morning a friend took one look at me and said, “Wow, you must have had a heck of a party in Vegas. Look at the bags under your eyes.” I could have told her but, as you know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Birthday Madness

2010-10-14T09:00:00.000-04:00

We’re in the thick of pre-school birthday season. I don’t know what it says about our procreative decision-making but after a late summer lull the invitations are descending faster than leaves. And this requires some weeding out. Some parents are kind and inclusive taking a democratic stand by inviting their child’s entire class. I’m rather less charitable and perform a sort of arbitrary selection process, balking when I have to ask my own pre-schooler who on earth Stephen or Petunia is. And when the party is held at McDonald’s it get an instant thumbs down. Look, I’m no macrobiotic Gwyneth Paltrow but if I’ve managed to avoid feeding it to my children this far, I can’t have that undone in the space of an afternoon. I tell them Ronald McDonald is just a random clown and they even point at the golden arches to yell, “Junk food!” Sure, I can feel pretty pious.

Look, there are only so many weekends in the year. Fifty-two to be precise. And when two–thirds of these kiddie birthdays fall every Saturday and Sunday between Labour Day and Thanksgiving, it has to be alright to draw the line. My own social life has suffered a good deal since my very lovely progeny appeared. It only seems fair to clear their dance cards every once in a while. But then comes the gift dilemma: to give or not to give. For a while, I took the approach that with a decline should come a card and nominally loaded gift certificate but I scientifically determined (after reading an intensely commented thread on Facebook) that consensus says no go equals no gift. So I went with the majority opinion and revised my tactics.

Now, that’s all reactionary, of course. It all changes when it’s your Little Mary or Jim. Maybe we have to take the blame for the first years where our excitement exceeded that of the bemused birthday child presented with bouncy bounces and petting zoos not long after they could walk. Nearly four year olds are a different breed with tightly held opinions and passionate but fickle love affairs with clothes and characters from Princesses to Toy Story. There I am, the parent that intended to topple the Disney juggernaut, ultimately giving in to amorous cries for Princess book bags and Toy Story Band-Aids. The marketing gurus are not stupid at all. At the end of the day, it’s the parents opening their wallets to fulfill their child’s fantasies with Toy Story coloring books and dressing up costumes. (Shoes and jewels sold separately).

Our daughter’s birthday falls right before Hallowe’en. Having spent the better part of the year planning to be a simple ghost (draped sheet, white make up, black eyes) we have since changed gear to a near obsession with Jessie the yodeling Toy Story 2 cowgirl. We gave it time to lose steam but this crush grew legs and dealt its own crushing blows: “Mummy, I’m ready to take down my ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ posters. I’d like a Princess or Jessie bedroom.” And from adoration comes emulation so I am forced to play along as the voice for Buzz and Woody while simultaneously playing mother to a real life Jessie the cowgirl.

Once you give in to trying the saccharine Disney Kool-Aid, suddenly you’re hooked and find the whole family yodeling along to Toy Story soundtracks and listening to narrated contractions of the screenplay. Plans for a homemade ghost costume go out the window and instead we’re sitting up late night hunting for ready-to-wear Jessie costumes online. The Disney juggernaut chugs along happily with my daughter at the helm.

Two weeks out from her birthday and we’ve been so busy attending (or declining) everyone else’s high-octane Build-A-Bear and Tiny Chef parties that I haven’t technically made plans for hers. The Art Room and Paint-Your-Own pottery places were booked up long ago so we’re torn over something nice and outdoorsy, but weather dependent, or reeling it in to bring the good old fashioned party back home. I’m already taking a deep breath at the prospect of fifteen four year olds hopped up on sugar and birthday excitement and the amount of pre-party baking and post-party clean up. Luckily, as an aspiring astronaut, my daughter provides her own solution. “Don’t worry, Mummy,” she says, “We can build a space ship, eat space cake and turn out the lights.” Not a bad idea. Perhaps we can all take a nap.

House of Sickness

2010-10-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

We are, once again, the House of Sickness. No surprise there since our daughter was only back at school for three days when she brought home the first cold malady of the season. I’ve read most people get a couple of colds a year, while children get about a dozen. I don’t know who came up with those figures. Or whether the people getting a couple of colds annually don’t have small children, but in our home we believe in sharing and that includes illness.

The British grandparents were visiting when Labor Day pushed the children back to school in new clothes, toting book bags bigger than themselves. When Round One of illness showed up in the form of fever and a hacking cough, my father reached for my imported stockpile of Dispirin. Nothing more than pure Aspirin, it’s a national fix-all and preventative cold cure in Britain. Every time I rush to the medicine cabinet at the sign of a sore throat, my husband roars about my Voodoo British medicine.

Along the same lines, I’ve had great difficulty convincing him of the curative properties of salt and oatmeal baths for irritated skin; an even harder time convincing him of the medicinal benefits of gargling with salt water, as hot as one can bear, to stave off the sniffles. The fact that I have a head full of home remedies surprises no one more than me. Probably less an officially imparted technique, I think I acquired this knowledge via subtle osmosis. Sort of a home religion. If everyone has faith that it’s The Right Way, you just go with the flow.

Recent news has brought me some vindication. A New York Times banner headline caught my eye with its question: ‘Really? The Claim: Gargling with Salt Water Can Ease Cold Symptoms’. My first reaction was delight. I was thrilled there was something in black and white and published in a respected newspaper citing a study that demonstrated a 40% reduction in cold symptoms among the gargling group versus the control. (Note: Using print outs from random web sites to support your lofty argument will only provides your skeptical opposition with a chance to scorn the source. Hold up a copy of the New York Times and you hear crickets. It must be true.) My secondary reaction was confusion. Could this really be news? Even the journalist came across as surprised and a tad impressed. Apparently, we must wait in anticipation for the release of the Mayo Clinic Book of Home Remedies this October. Who knows how many other lost treatments it will contain that our great-grandparents took for granted.

Speaking of great-grandparents. My great-aunt passed away recently and my parents attended her funeral in England. My Great-Aunt Kate, a strong figure both in character and stature at 6 foot tall, had chosen a coffin made of woven Japanese water lily reeds into which the funerial flowers were threaded. I was particularly interested in this seemingly eco-modern choice, especially for a woman in her nineties. A younger aunt on the other side of the family picked out a wicker version for her Humanist funeral a couple of years ago and I remember finding little choice stateside when I’d looked into it back then.

Now, as I hunted for eco-friendly coffin options, (which, by the way, can be viewed as strange by family when you leave the pages open on your computer), I came across the Natural Burial Company which offers a variety of materials from willow to cane or a really impressive pod made of hand painted post-consumer newspaper, or as I like to call it, papier-maché. All of these options are made by hand in the UK, so perhaps it wasn’t surprising the website refers to England as “the pioneer of the natural burial” although it made me laugh out loud. Handmade paper coffins and woodland alternatives to cemeteries might be one thing, as Northern European nations continue to lose their religion, but what about a good old-fashioned funeral pyre, popular for centuries the world over? Or a nice celebratory send off down the River Ganges? What could be more natural than that?

In other recent news, there was another arresting study that found the best way to cleanse pesticides and viruses from your fresh fruit n’ veg was to hand wash with tap water or light washing up liquid. My mother had been deeply impressed at the bottles of vegetable wash stacked beside every produce display in the supermarket and was ready to buy into the notion that America was onto something new. Now, a study by the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station declares tap water works as well as anything, and that it is friction - the physical action of hand washing yoru produce - is most effective in pesticide removal. Imagine that.

Another study found the addition of a little vinegar increases the removal of bacteria and viruses to 90%. Makes you wonder whether that little chestnut will be featured in the Mayo Clinic Book of Home Remedies.

Duds, Suds, and Revelations

2010-09-30T09:00:00.000-04:00

Last weekend I gave myself one of those rare nights off from home life and headed into the city for a dinner party. A reunion of sorts for an old group of formerly single, city dwelling, twenty-somethings now scattered over the course of a decade around the globe. We gathered at a very noisy taqueria in New York City, voices pinging off the low cellar ceiling, while a larger party of former frat boys-reinvented-as-day traders raised the volume to a level that surely rivalled the decibel output of a jackhammer. Reunited, we now represented two New Yorkers visiting from Hong Kong and Cambodia respectively, one British ex-pat residing in NYC, a New Yorker repatriated from a lucrative stint in Puerto Rico to work, charitably, for the Department of Health; an upstate New Yorker transplanted downstate, and two of us, an American and a Brit, trying our hand at home-making in Columbia County.

These were friends from city days when I kept my shoes in the oven and ordered in on the rare evening that we didn’t go out. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise that my old flat-mate’s fridge would still be filled with perfume and expensive face creams, several rows of bottled water, some wine and beer, but practically nothing capable of sustaining me after climbing five floors in his walk-up building.

If this were a moment in Carrie Bradshaw’s life, I’d have been filmed tapping away on my laptop musing aloud over the directions our love lives have taken. So I’ll fill the role. In keeping with at least some thirty-to forty something demographics, one among us remains happily and perennially single (a serial dater with a personal rule never to exceed two dates); and a few still bear a hopeful torch (and one or more online dating accounts) in the search for Mr. Right. Bucking the national trend, only one of us is divorced but we can account for that, somewhat cynically, since two-thirds of our table were ineligible to marry their Mr. Right, no matter how fantastic he might be.

The friend visiting from Cambodia has a long respected history in the New York fashion industry and in fulfilling her own personal ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ story has managed to blend her many talents to open an amazing clothing boutique, ‘Wanderlust’, while engaging tourists in her involvement with a local Phnom Penh orphanage. Choc-a-bloc with effortless dresses and tops, her range twirls with colourful, unforced style, plenty to get industry tongues wagging and some nice write ups in Vogue.

Fortunately, my old flat-mate had picked up one of the Wanderlust tops for me this summer at a trunk sale. It immediately earned the wardrobe distinction of Favourite Item and was, quite frankly, worn to death. Despite the folds and hand stitching, it stood up remarkably well to the rigours of Western detergent and machine wash cycles – I’m rarely compliant with recommendations of hand wash -- but upstate it would find more abuse.

Insult first came in the form of the airborne output of a berry-eating bird while drying on the clothesline. Injury was added when it was it was re-hung and forgotten, (after caving to a hand-wash to remove the berry stain), and spent the night in the throes of a wild storm. By morning I caught sight of it, a speck of pale blue lying in the mud, as though a herd of wild buffalo had trampled it. Armed with a selection of stain removers and due diligence, I managed to resurrect it once more. Of course I hadn’t counted on the babysitter popping it in the tumble drier for a quick spin with the baby clothes. It practically required a Red Cross operation in the basement to soak and stretch it back to wearable form.

I spilled the sorry tale to the designer -- of course, it might have been more sensible to keep the story to myself, but with a cocktail or two under our belts, confessions seemed the right way. Taking cue, another friend pulled off his hat to reveal curiously dark hair from a botched effort to fade out the gray. And despite our collective wrinkles, not one of us had yet succumbed to – or admitted? – trying Botox so we were at least able to laugh in comfort as a decade of revelations stacked up on some riotously noisy air.

Food Fight

2010-09-23T09:00:00.001-04:00

We’re back in that interesting place where the refreshing insights of visitors from the motherland - this time in the form of unabridged commentary from my parents - starkly reminds me I’m in a foreign land. Of course, parental observations are rarely, if ever, limited to external sights. My mother demonstrated that with her reaction to my appearance in a checkered puffball dress and a parental classic, “You can’t go out looking like that.” Luckily, with the onset of maturing age and a manic household, you no longer care what anyone else thinks, and that includes fashion advice dispensed by your concerned mother.

We’ve had a jolly old time tramping about the glorious countryside of Columbia County from Olana to Stuyvesant Falls, and sampling lashings of local food in between. My parents are in equal parts appreciative and gob-smacked that I’ve managed to recreate myself in the image of a semi-retired farmer’s wife, even if I don a puffball skirt to weed the garden. I took them to pick up our crop share at Roxbury Farm and for an encounter with the oxen, blacksmiths and broom-weavers at Lindenwald’s fall festival, and I don’t think they’ve seen me in a pair of stilettos more than once.

After walking the outdoor sculpture fields of Art Omi, my mother was left practically fanning herself with relief that I’d abandoned original plans to wed between the towering disembodied white heads. In the snow. In December. In pink Wellies. I should thank local caterer Tommy Carlucci for his word to the wise that such a setting may be more conducive in warmer months. And though, back then, we did have a December wedding, ultimately neither the pink Wellies nor the pink sheep made the final cut.

Our county travels have reminded me how lucky we are with such easy access to a bevy of farm fresh produce whether the delectably creamy Camembert of the Old Chatham Sheep Farm or the largesse of our weekly biodynamic CSA share. My own vegetable plot has gone berserk having been left largely to its own devices, and the whims of the sun and our auto-timed sprinkler system. It’s actually a jungle out there and a little unnerving. Giant, yawning zucchini plants flap elephant sized leaves, stick out bright yellow tongues, and prove utterly intractable thanks to tight-fisted curly tendrils holding fast for dear life. If you’ve ever seen the old British television show, Day of the Trifids, (which was pretty scary back then or maybe it was just because I was about 7 years old), you’ll understand why my dreams are currently filled with angry, man-eating, zucchini plants.

Speaking of largesse, these family visits are inevitably punctuated by food. And lots of it. Brits are still largely unaccustomed to American-size portions so every meal, and every course of every meal, tends to start off with wide-eyed exclamations along the lines of: “Oh my word!” “Look at that!” Now, it’s well documented that size isn’t everything but Americans undoubtedly win the day for the most generously-filled sandwiches (light years from the single slice of ham in a buttered British sarnie) and appetizers that could feed a family of four. This love of large portions has long fueled a steady flow of British television covering travel, cooking, and documentaries conceived solely to track down legendary American foods of epic proportions, or to capture on film the great American invention, “the doggy-bag”.

Luckily, for me, the local restaurants fanned the flames of infamy with improbably proportioned pumpkins (mostly decorative, though sadly we’ll miss the great pumpkin festival of Cooperstown, NY) and colossal plates served up inside. Jackson’s Old Chatham House must serve up the largest steaks outside of Texas. The rib eye, actually larger than the plate, resembles a cross-section of a cow, the way Damien Hirst might serve things if he became a restauranteur. And while the Old Chatham Country Store presents local ingredients in an confidently creative menu bursting at the seams with flavour, they didn’t take it easy on us either. Perhaps we should have shared our East-meets-West calamari starters but who can blame us for loosening our belts and pressing on?

With my parents talking about going on a diet when they get home, I tried to slice up the differences. Perhaps Americans just like bigger portions; it probably represents value for money, while Brits are happy with smaller portions, especially if they can pay less upfront. Think about it. Britain was always the world of “want not, waste not” so you can imagine the dilemma of seating dogged British diners intent on eating their way through American-size fare?

As my parents again prepare to leave me stateside, scratching their heads over gin and tonics served up in pint glasses, perhaps Gershwin still sums it up best: You say tomato, I say tomahto… Let’s call the whole thing off.

Over Here

2010-09-16T09:00:00.001-04:00

The grandparents are over here from the mother country and – bam! – my daughter’s English accent has kicked right back in. I’m in heaven hearing the inflection in her questions, the staccato phonetics and adjusted pronunciation. Well, that was until she suggested we sing “Mary had a little lamb”, an Eliza Doolittle moment which suggest her true roots are somewhere between native New Yorker and a card-holding resident of Fargo.

I can thank her pre-school teacher for the nod towards Ohio or, at least, Western New York. After agonizing over a girl’s name - (we had about five on ice while I was in labour) – and specifically one with a pronunciation that would work equally in England or America, it took about 5 minutes in Pre-K class for my daughter to come home sounding upstate. Way upstate. I mean Buffalo. I hadn’t thought it possible to massacre ‘Annabel’ but after hearing it pronounced it with a long ‘A’ for an entire year who could blame her for asking why it did not start with an E?

On this visit my mother brought me a magazine article written by a Russian immigrant who’d invited her mother to move in with her family in America. The stark reality of her offer only dawned in full when she admitted she hadn’t actually left Russia to flee Communism or some terror, but simply to escape the stranglehold her traditional mother had on their home. Now, in inviting her to stay she was afraid the iron fist was about to take over and smother them with rigid Russian requirements.

My own mother joked that I must have fled the trappings of the maternal nest in my move across the Atlantic. With half my friends traipsing the world it was more of a right of passage than fleeing. But what really resonated was the author’s admission of a desire – one I wrestle with daily – to impart a kernel of our foreign selves in our foreign-born children. Such a deep need for them to feel something other than American, to know their other home, even as they blend seamlessly into the comforts of American life right before our eyes.

With 9/11 marking my parents’ arrival, I thought about the furore over the construction of the mosque near Ground Zero and the anti-Muslim sentiments fueling irrational threats of organized Qu’ran burns. It reminded me that the concept of being American is an amorphous one. Over fifteen years ago, one of my university professors asked a packed auditorium, “What is an American?” and I have been trying to answer the question every since. Every now and then I type a few pages that I think I’ll send to him but I revise my answer so often (and over the years I may have gone at least partially native) so the question remains.

During stateside grad school years, while I was trying out some ill-advised American trends like two-tone streaked hair, CAT boots, and darker than required lip liner, I ran into an old acquaintance who stepped back (somewhat aghast, I think) and announced that I no longer looked English. My assimilation was complete. It had not been my intention, just some experimenting with cultural norms and doing what girlfriends around the world generally do. Like all experiences entertained during foreign travel, mine ended when I decided to go home, which in this final case, meant staying. With America as my home, my house became an extension of me where all things British could be preserved. I had no problem with my toddler hoping for a mid-morning ‘elevenses’. And to this day we still break for afternoon tea, well at least on weekends when we’re have more time. Despite living abroad, your foreign habits can’t help but finally come up for air. And child rearing and raising, more primal events, only bring you face to face with your own values and more than a dozen of your mother’s. I may not have overtly known how hard-wired my British cultural norms were until I started pouting that they weren’t just passed on genetically to my children.

Suddenly, the customs and habits of ‘my people’ were being doled out in the home in spades. Even still, when my mother appeared in the kitchen she wondered aloud as I sautéed garlic or threw in Indian spices and she counted the ways her daughter’s household differed from hers.

It’s not lost on me, as I strive to inject the absent portion of their European lives into my children’s days like a sort of compact Euro-vitamin, I must tread cautiously. I can’t expect them to be something they’ve only known on immersion trips back home or in 5 minute doses of Morph and The Wombles on YouTube. Watching my offspring grow up in America is having a new impact on my life. This year, in a decision that blows my mind, I have decided to join them in dual-citizenship. It won’t change our belief in who we are, but hopefully will unite the best of both worlds, old and new.

Fries, Flies and Fearless Asides

2010-09-09T09:00:00.000-04:00

Every now and then I wonder at the odd conversations that just spontaneously crop up. It reminds me that I used to keep a journal of conversation snippets overheard in buses, trains and coffee shops. That might sound voyeuristic but it really was quite satisfying. You never really caught the whole story so you’d have to fill in the blanks. I believed it a legitimate tool for fledging literary efforts and certainly, read back sequentially, it made for a crazed dialogue. Not sure what I did with the book now. I wish I still had it.

Comparing notes on the local county fair, a friend told me how much he loved jars of briny pickles. In fact he loves them so much he was positively affronted by the notion of deep-frying them. This after learning my toddler chooses them over toffee apples and pink candy floss. But then the concession stands of the fair seem to consider most things fair game for the deep fryer from mushrooms, dough, and pork chops to broccoli, candy bars, and pickles. I’m not sure they are actually trying to improve upon flavour but perhaps prolong the product’s lifespan. On the heels of reading ‘Water for Elephants’, the New York Times Big Top bestseller where punters’ lemonade was mixed with the elephant’s swill water, I doubt things have changed too much.

On opening night I found myself ringside at the demolition derby honestly by choice for the entertainment value, when just a few short years ago my jaw was literally on the floor watching these bashed up, spray-painted vehicles, otherwise destined for a junkyard crusher, spinning their wheels and reversing in top speed death-throws. After an unscheduled poultry fight in the 4H shed, it seemed fitting to learn of the beer tent melee that required troopers, sheriffs, and Tazer guns to subdue the madding crowd.

Then again, none of us are exempt from the occasional public scene and every now and then necessity tells common sense to take a hike. In my case, I have been guilty of squeezing hours into the day by plopping fed and bathed children into the car to run evening errands. If they don’t fall asleep, it’s a 50/50 gamble. You may arrive with a cute, malleable and sleepy-headed version or another that is tightly wound and over-excited with selective hearing. Pressed by weekend plans for a tangle of guests, I found myself chaperoning the latter around a big box store. As one child wailed from his shopping trolley jail the other spun on her tummy on the floor and my patience quickly dialed down to Empty. Two ladies stood in the middle of the aisle preventing my rapid escape, just watching. Whether I was feeling indignant or just belligerent is hard to say but they looked pretty sheepish as I snapped, “Are you just standing there watching this?” Apparently, when I’m low on patience a cat may not look at a queen.

Back at the fair, I noticed many of the food vendors doing battle with this year’s unreasonable quota of flies. I felt badly as I knew it really wasn’t a question of hygiene. Our own kitchen has become a veritable battleground as I perfect my backhand with a fly-swatter and invent non-offensive expletives when my hair touches the sticky fly sheets my husband decided to hang. It’s a grotesque thing to see fly paper studded with wiggling black torsos and even worse when you forget it’s there and have to explain its existence to company. I popped into a supermarket to purchase more. It really does seem like an antiquated product, medieval you might say, but the woman at customer service looked at me as though I was revealing a communicable disease. I dug a deeper hole “It’s sort of an infestation… well, not an infestation, they just keep coming in…” She inched about behind the counter. “We don’t sell that sort of thing.” I wanted to know why not when they sell mouse-traps and ant killer. She was looking beyond me to others now gathering in line, probably mentally mouthing for help. I must have sounded urgent because a sympathetic customer behind me commented the flies have been horrific this summer. She told me to try a hardware store. Or a dollar store. And as I took down driving directions I imagined someone else writing down this snippet of conversation. And I wondered how they’d fill in the blanks.

PB&J

2010-09-02T09:00:00.001-04:00

No matter where I am in the world I always get that back to school feeling just as summer draws to a close. No matter how old or where in the world I am, it crops up as a nod to seasonal change as leaves shrivel and evenings crisp up. In this house we call it “school bus”. A sort of dread tinged with excitement like the first day back at school after weeks of free-range summer. But as soon as my mind uses words like “crisp” and “autumnal” I start thinking about food. Stews and pies and all the devastatingly good things I’m going to stockpile as I hunker down for East coast hibernation.

I love food and spend a disproportionate amount of time imagining what I’d like to eat, what I might cook for dinner or where I could go to be fed. No matter where I live I can usually gauge my degree of cultural assimilation by my picks. In the snowstorms of Warsaw I became rapidly addicted to the fantastic offerings fogging up the windows of the local ‘cukiernia’ - cake shops - that produced the most outrageously delicious, diet-busting pastries (Polish cheesecake is a unresolved weakness), certain to satisfy the emotional ups and downs of a nineteen year old working abroad.

Living on a Greek island, I’d walk past a bakery twice daily on my way to work and again heading home in the wee hours after strangely fun nights Greek dancing with locals at any number of taverna. If I hadn’t succumbed to my cheese pastry weakness in the morning, the bakery provided a door to door delivery service selling their doughboy wares from a large tray on the back of a moped. On a good day, or perhaps a bad one, I might end up consuming three pastries before close of business and all before the Greeks took me out for dinner at midnight.

New York City, as a melting pot of all things cultural and culinary, wouldn’t be outdone and any number of Greek diners had me waltzing to work daily with a blue edged paper coffee cup and the largest, fluffiest, cream cheese-stuffed bagel in hand. And that’s without mentioning the tantalizing French patisserie that greeted me as I exited the number 6 subway at the end of my block.

You see there is gastronomic pleasure in going native, generally with calorie-laden treats that would shock your mother in the homeland. It’s all part of that ‘being abroad’ mentally where you try things your common sense would forbid back home. So I came to America with some trepidation for what may befall me. And although I tried corndogs on a stick in New Mexico and a deep-fried Mars Bar in Texas, my American weakness turned out to be seafood: crustaceans in New Orleans, steamers in Cape Cod, and lobsters in Maine. Nothing but highbrow, heart healthy deliciousness, not the type of artery-clogging American naughtiness that would ring Elvis Presley’s bell.

Still, I balked at the American love affair with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. In fact, in over twelve years stateside I managed to successfully steer clear of them. Mostly because I don’t like peanut butter, so adding blackcurrant jelly was about as appetizing as putting ketchup on ice-cream. Unfortunately, when small children and pre-school entered the scene, so did the requests for PB&J on many a harried morning. Before I knew it I was chomping along with the best of them. Day at the beach? PB&J. Unplanned play date? PB&J. While I’ve managed to sustain my hatred of iced tea, that heinous creation, the PB&J Wall has fallen and I take it as worrying proof of my assimilation.

Now, with September and the Columbia County Fair upon us, I’m already salivating at the prospect of toffee apples and speared salt potatoes swimming in butter. I’m shifting gear and thinking about apple doughnuts and cinammon-y hot apple cider. But there’s still one line I fear to cross: fried dough. I don’t know whether it really originates from an Italian kitchen or just a half-robbed pantry of an impoverished New York baker, but I can’t wrap my head around something that seems to lack any nutritional value at all. But we shall see. If I can get past the heavy dousing of confectioner’s sugar, I’ll give it a whirl. And if it tastes good, I might have to consider myself an American.

The Last Straw

2010-08-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

If you think there are several ways to leave an island, you can rest assured that gale force winds and hurricane-churned seas will flat out negate every one. I hate pouring rain at the best of times but nothing quite beats loading up your car at the end of a long vacation in a downpour. Luckily, along with everyone else on island, we invested in pricey Martha’s Vineyard raincoats but our new nautical styling did little to inspire as we dangled from the car roof, desperately trying to close the rain-slick Thule on top. The slumlord owner of our adorable rental cottage had set Big Bertha’s cleaning services on us at 10am on the nose – perhaps guessing by my ill-humoured email that we might not be inclined to clean the place ourselves – and despite having assurances we could stay until 3pm given our evening ferry. We packed at jet-propelled speed, stuffed every nook with bags and beach-gear until the car resembled one of those precarious Indian buses topped off with goats and chickens, and bee-lined for lunch on the cliffs and retail therapy.

Now, at one time in London, there was a special form of torture where unfortunate criminals were tied, legs aloft, for goats to lick the soles of their feet. I always found it strangely mild until I learned the goats’ constant quest for salt, licking away, rain or shine, would result in horrifically ravaged, raw feet. Right up there in this unusual torture category should be the pain of waiting for a ferry for hours in a Nor’easter storm, with 60 mph winds, and two small car-bound frantic children desperate to pee, eat, pee, eat, or just scream instead of sleeping. You get the picture.

I made a run for the bathroom with the three year old around 9pm. Reappearing in the storm-wrecked night, wind gusts practically shoving us over, rain pouring and a million car and ferry lights flashing, my heart sank. As reliable as Sod’s Law, the cars had finally moved and ours had gone. They must have made it onto the ferry. We ran to the loading ramp and begged to be let on – a Madonna and child in the night. We made it as they secured chains and I got through to my husband on the mobile phone. “No,” he said. “We’re not on the ferry, still in line.” Now I’m trying to run off the ferry ramp and the men in bright yellow fishermen’s oils are holding me back telling me, in a Hotel California moment, “You’re not allowed off the ferry once you’re on”, so I do the only thing I can and flip out. We have nothing with us, no bags, no money, and, no, my husband’s not on the ferry. They clearly take the mad Englishwoman seriously as I leg it off the ferry unrestrained and five minutes later we watched it pull away.

After four hours they called it. The web site had been accurate for hours - most ferries from 6:30pm to 9:45pm were cancelled – and the beleagured Steamship Authority staff were going door to door advising us the newly stranded a shelter was opening at the local Tisbury school. And while I should have been glad not to be on a smashed up sea buffeted by the edges of Hurricane Danielle, the mental list of mild tortures was getting longer: whether to sleep in the car or school shelter with insomniac children, or do battle with the masses in the mad dash for rare peak season hotel rooms.

I posted pleas on Facebook, (social media has to be good for something). Next we pulled an ethically questionable stunt by heading back to our rental house in the hope the incoming renters hadn’t made it over either, but someone else was already cozy in our beds.

No room at every inn until one front desk person had a friend with a boutique hotel in Edgartown. I’m not saying there was a kickback but by 10pm - and $400 later - all four of us were sinking into a king size bed in a pure white, 100% eco-aware room at the ubiquitous Hob Knob hotel. No discount for booking an otherwise empty room half way through the night. In a dog eat dog world, the competition for rooms just boosted the economy. I suppose it was some sort of karma that the Weather Channel was running its storm update over a show about New Orleans desperate days during Hurricane Katrina.

At 7am a phone call from a faceless Steam Authority woman on her last nerve broke our reverie with barked orders to return to the harbour. No breakfast in bed for me. No, with incoming ferries likely to run, we were to wait in line, wind gusts shaking the car like a cheap 25 cent ride, just in case there was room for standbys on their return leg. I hadn’t really played out the complexity of packing standby vehicles onto ferries already jammed solid with the reserved arrivals and departures. The soaked staff knew nothing. Only that it might take all day.

So here we sit: cars to the left of me, ocean to the right. More specifically, ocean joining us as the Atlantic waves crash over the harbour road. We have been rewarded with a magic pink slip emblazoned with a high-tech handwritten number 18, and the jaw-dropping promise that we might get on a ferry sometime this afternoon. Or this evening, if we’re lucky. By 9am the children were out of ways to entertain themselves although my one year old has started shrieking into the depths of a beach bucket which at least muffles the sound. My 3 year old just had a conniption when my husband’s guitar case dislodged and landed on her head. With the spectacular odds against getting home today I might have to play the lottery. Definitely 8.23.10. And 24. And that magic number 18.

Wish You Were Here

2010-08-19T09:00:00.000-04:00

First, let me make you insanely jealous as I tell you I’m writing this from the beach on Martha’s Vineyard, sun shining, waves crashing on the shore. The children are making sandcastles complete with dripdrip turrets and moat, and seem to have buried their father, at least up to his neck. Having walked the beach collecting shells and sea-glass I’m now getting down to VIB (very important business) with my laptop on the beach. Let’s just hope I look terribly important and don’t get any sand on the keyboard.

Martha’s Vineyard, the summer holiday we’ve been hankering after. Our first two-week beach vacation perhaps since our honeymoon. That’s why I want to specially thank Peter for renting us his lovely holiday home at premium peak season summer rates. We’re just going to kick back and wait for President Obama, his family and entourage to arrive on Friday. And while we do, I’ll tell you what you’re missing.

Since Peter assured us of his 2 acre property’s “total privacy”, you could have shared our joy when our neighbour hosted a charity benefit for one thousand bikers. Not one hundred. One thousand. And he’s been hosting it for 22 years. “Don’t be intimidated,” he said, as twelve blue Porta-Potties were erected on the other side of our deck. “They’re mostly weekend warriors, plumbers, electricians, lawyers….” With the prospect of all-day live bands, motorbike games, beer and barbecue dancing like sugar plums in our heads – (he kindly waived the strict Over 21 rule for our three and one year olds) – we opted for a very long day at the beach, but we did come back in time for a personal viewing of a cat fight to rival the Jerry Springer show. Above the roar of motorbikes riding in circles of death, the crowd whoops of approval, the bands, and the steady drone of the generator suctioning out the Porta-Potties we decided dinner had better be out.

If you had come with us, you would have arrived with mental pictures from Peter’s website. His adorable three-bedroom saltbox with the weathered cedar shingles had a wraparound deck, perfect for the children’s tricycles, and the Martha’s Vineyard essential: an outdoor shower after a day at the beach. It boasted manicured gardens like a mini Versailles: dwarf firs all in a line, topiaried boxwood hedges, gorgeous flowering shrubs in huge urns, and a fish pond with lily-pads. Unfortunately, Peter forgot to tell us that in the five years since those photos were taken, the garden has become a wilderness with cracked brick paths, broken steps, and an extraordinary level of Do It Yourself home improvements. He’s done a nice job of stringing Christmas lights up a couple of gnarly trees, and the pond, we discovered, is a wall of cement blocks lined with black tarp. To the side is a special stash of a dozen empty bottles of laundry detergent, perhaps placed there in the hopes the recycling fairy will spirit them away.

Peter forgot to mention a few other details. There’s the cute gap between the deck and the backdoors where our one year old would get his arm stuck, the comedic broken towel rail in the bathroom that falls off the wall every time you hang anything on it, and the rusty baseboard radiators just begging for a quick spray of Rustoleum and the hope that everyone’s up to date on their Tetanus shots. Not to worry. Of the four extra large double-glazed windows looking out over the deck and gardens, two are so completely obfuscated by salt residue there’s no way to see through (like the whitewashed windows of a shop that’s gone out of business) so you won’t actually know if your children are dangling off a broken step or stuck between the boards. But Peter clearly has a sense of humour and saved the best for last. Having replaced a few pieces of decking, he just took out a couple of others like a sort of dicey game of hopscotch. Safely cordoning off those areas, my husband ventured into the outdoor shower and promptly fell through a rotten floorboard.

Previously accessible Peter has decided, in his infinite wisdom, not to return phone calls or emails. If you feel you might like to have as much fun as us, I’ll be happy to provide his information. But don’t forget to ask for the date of the biker benefit.

Art Al Fresco

2010-08-05T21:00:00.001-04:00

When we moved to Columbia County it was with great trepidation that I was somehow being lured down a slippery slope to pastoral boredom. Back then, business travel had such a hold on my life that I was only here about as often as the city weekenders. So I was unprepared for the area’s secret weapon, an extraordinary proliferation of summertime cultural activities that, having lain dormant all winter, would land a sucker-punch as you came out of hibernation. Just as I prepared to tear my eyes out after several blindingly bleak months (since, skiing excluded, I take absolutely zero pleasure in digging my car out every frigid morn to ferry self and progeny to town or school), spring finally appears with a smorgasbord of artsy offerings for the warmer months. I discovered this anomaly in our first year. Every local rag and free magazine was reporting the shows and festivals we’d missed and every weekend left us further behind the eight ball with failed attempts to be at the right place at the right time. I decided those involved had spent their six tundra months not like me, huddled around a flame a la the little match girl, but in a veritable hive of activity planning, piloting and rehearsing before shaking their oeuvres like Puck’s faerie flower over the visiting masses.

Taking it on as a personal challenge I spent our second summer compiling an exhaustive “What’s On” binder with maps, fliers, theatre listings and festivals organized by month, season, and topped off with the tourist bureau’s own round up. With this work complete, it sat imposingly in our guest room bureau in all its glory, only to slowly age and gather dust. I had been proud of my effort. As a cultural tome it was supposed to provide guidance and inspiration. Instead, it stared back at me like a sad puppy while I dusted around it. It gave me guilt trips. It grinned a sheaf of pinched papers like a bent accordian. I still hadn’t made it to the Williamstown Theatre Festival or the Fisher Center at Bard College. What was I doing with my time, I lamented. And while Tanglewood successfully became an extension of our outdoor living, we repeatedly missed Bob Dylan at Pittsfield’s Waconah Park and extraordinary talents at Great Barrington’s Mahaiwe Theatre. We tiptoed around Olana and Lindenwald but barely tapped into the historic homes of local luminaries Edith Wharton, Daniel Chester French, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Herman Melville. And even though Oscar nominated movie ‘The Cider House Rules’ was filmed at Ventfort Hall, we still hadn’t been. Thankfully, Ang Lee anticipated our slothful ways and brought filming of “Taking Woodstock” to our door, otherwise we might have shamefacedly skipped that too.

What was going on? Slowly, by adding children to the mix we now had a show of bottoms, bathrooms, bottles and belligerence to factor in. We made it to the Austerlitz Blueberry Festival and Columbia County Fair since food and fayres go hand and in hand with al fresco pitstops. But I determined to do better. Much like crafts where I sometimes wonder who’s getting more out it, it can be a challenge to sustain focus but the early experience has to be worthwhile. Picnicking on the lawn of Jacob’s Pillow Inside/Out dance performances, my three year old whirls along, desperate to join the stage. Of course, she also rolled in the hummus and asked the people in front for their names. “What’s he doing?” she whispered as the choreographer melded physical theatre with spoken word and modern dance.

At Art Omi, our old stomping ground, the children marveled at the giant sculptures protruding from earth and air, other worldly additions to acres of rolling natural beauty. Open air rehearsals on Tanglewood’s lawns lend the perfect backdrop for child’s play. Nothing better than tag and badminton while Yo Yo Ma’s cello conjures up dramatis personae in the air. Hide and seek and naming flowers at the Berkshire Botanical Gardens tested burgeoning toddler gardening skills. Further afield, an early morning visit to Saratoga Race Track brought awe to curious faces as they watched the thoroughbreds exercising on the backstretch followed by the excitement of smoothing soft noses brought to visit by generous trainers. We still have the grounds of Naumkeag, Blantyre and Chesterwood to reach but at least we’re more than scratching the surface. In a year or two we may yet be authorities on the cultural and culinary offerings of the area. And in the meantime, we’re happy to keep browsing the mother of all binders.

For Barter or Trade

2010-07-29T09:00:00.001-04:00

Last weekend, in a family restaurant, I wrangled two small children into a booster seat and high chair, deftly cinched the stainless steel cutlery - potential weaponry - into the table center and balanced three dinner plates on my arm before deciding on strategic placement. The waitress was amused.

“Oh, you were obviously a waitress too” she said, nodding along in a kindred spirit sort of way. I agreed distractedly catching sight of my one year old sliding under the table from his highchair and my three year old petting a Bernese mountain dog at least eight times her size. While dinner progressed fairly uneventfully, we created the inevitable scene of devastation that seems to occur while dining out. Pink and blue fake sugar sachets spread out for counting and colour sorting became a sodden mass after accidentally sliding into the spilled milk. My son helpfully rubbed pasta alfredo in his hair while I attempted to clean up the mess. As a good Englishwoman I am always wracked with guilt over such public scenes and consequently spent a good amount of time under the table with a pile of napkins picking up the stockpile of shredded French fries and celery sticks. Newly seated diners seemed surprised to see me darting out from under the table. I wondered if they had assumed the children were dining alone.

The waitress, clearly an old-timer, with a new charge silently shadowing her every move, seemed appreciative of my efforts to keep the table and three foot radius underneath somewhat clean. After pinching cheeks and chatting enthusiastically with the Smallest she lent in conspiratorially, “Most of the parents don’t understand, do they? When you’ve been a waitress you know how to deal with kids in restaurants. When did you stop?” I paused. It’s true I waited tables and tended bar in university and grad school but that was a half-lifetime ago. Not wanting to offend by implying it didn’t actually spawn a career path, I ended up mumbling something about it being a long time ago and staying home to look after the children. She mistook the cue and raised an eyebrow. “That’s nice to be able to be home with the kids. You must have a hard-working husband.” Ouch.

In the same week, we parted company with a contractor who had the cheek to suggest I was holding things up and wasting his time and “[your] husband’s money” by stopping their hill excavating and grading to voice my concerns over the gradient. Apparently after watching me usher children around every day for several weeks he had the impression I was the bonbon-eating variety of stay at home mother, perhaps on my husband’s payroll or a weekly allowance. Forget the work hours at the opposite end of the day after children are safely tucked in bed. We stood in the mud exchanging heated words until he had the nerve to tell me to stop talking – surely forgetting the value-added interest from future referrals - and I pulled him off the job.

On the heels of these exchanges, I popped into a jewelry shop in shorts with the Smalls in tow hoping to find a present and instead catching some sneering action a la Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. It seems the gush of harried mother that appeared before the assistant warranted scant attention and a terse comment that at five minutes to closing, no, they would not have time to clean my engagement ring. Funnily enough, my return solo visit in more fetching attire and a cute handbag elicited quite a different reaction. The lady was practically falling into the cabinet to help.

You’ve got to think people wouldn’t be so naïve as to assume motherhood erases all traces of a back-story but I was getting suspicious of how people viewed us as a group. In our toddler’s first pre-kindergarten year I’ve met mothers at school, playdates, or even picking up our crop share from a local farm, and I’m deeply impressed by the diversity of careers and current projects these impressive ladies have had or continue to juggle. From teachers, zoo-keepers and marketers to engineers, stylists and landscape designers there’s a whole cadre of career women out there re-issued with a personalized mummy stamp and running interference between home life and part-time projects. Picking up my share of kale and zucchini at the farm, it occurred to me that in this economy maybe we should be making better use of the old barter system. If people can be sharing crops, selling handcrafted items on etsy.com and swapping free items online perhaps we could do a little back scratching and tap into these talented minds? I’m going to throw it out there and if I get lucky maybe I’ll be able to trade in some copy writing and wrap up the excavation work.

Word Press

2010-07-23T09:00:00.002-04:00

We’re all at it. Consuming little sound bites of information, commenting on a five second headline and waiting for friends to chime in with the missing links. That’s assuming it’s a conversation at all. It might just as well be several friends or lesser known acquaintances responding to a Facebook status. I’ve come across the topic of rapid information consumption a few times but increasingly it seems couched in voices of concern. Since I’m so conditioned to skim reading it can feel like a guilty pleasure to sit and read while not technically accomplishing anything.

I’m not sure when luxury reading was downgraded on the priority list but I’d say the rot set in during broken sleep and midnight baby feeds when I’d sit in a dimly lit room rocking a hungry, fractious child flicking through baby magazines. I was soon lamenting that I was actually only capable of reading magazine columns or the very shortest of short stories. Half started novels gathered dust – (to think I used to keep three or four on the go) - or entire chapters would have to be re-read just to pick up the plot line again. Right after ‘baby brain’ lost its official grip, I was presented with a new nail in the coffin in the form of an iPhone. Now I could scroll through news links and Facebook banter at any time and it soon replaced the stretch as a five second mental break from ‘serious work’.

The rabblerousers are calling us out on our shrinking attention span, and they may have a point. Last week I was mocked for simultaneously surfing the internet and poring over a catalogue during a family movie night. (Alright, maybe I wasn’t taking this whole family movie night seriously enough but we were watching a Disney version of Planet Earth and I am certain I have seen cute polar bear cubs fall over themselves in any number of BBC productions before.) This has so much become my standard approach to movie viewing that I’m more likely to settle in with my phone, laptop, and credit card than a bucket of popcorn. Apparently, relaxation is a dying art. All atwitter with Facebook communiqués and the instant gratification of texting, it seems redundant, or even lazy, to limit ourselves to merely one task at a time.

The local news ran a story about teen addiction to texting. A Pew Survey found teen brain scans responded to a new text reply with a sudden release of the feel-good chemical dopamine. All hail instant gratification! But what about the thirty and forty somethings out there texting? Shouldn’t scientists should be worried about us? Teens can say “um” and “like” an inconceivable number of times in a sentence and still remember what they were talking about by the time they get to the end. For more mature texters, a new reliance on symbol-stuffed and vowel-disemboweled words (‘disemvoweled’) for texts and phone-based shopping lists may be doing untold damage.

Enter a new weapon in the slow movement arsenal: Slow Reading. Not content with slow food and slow travel, a Guardian online news article this week commented on several books that have been engaged in a battle royale over the importance and benefits of slow reading versus the technical skills and advantages of skim reading our way through life in print.

While the Slow Reading advocates trot out obvious benefits of reading - savouring words, feeling the cadence of carefully crafted passages, all that evocative imagery – and fears of reading becoming a lost art, I can’t help wonder if this is really new. The same fears circulated with the advent of computers – would anyone still wield a pen and write longhand? – and yet one has not exactly replaced the other. Maybe the risk of skim reading and sound bites in a time pressed world is bigger: we like our news compressed, espresso-style, but we don’t necessarily know the source.

Peppered by a curious toddler with endless questions about storybook characters both ancillary and anticipatory, I am constantly reminding her to listen since all will be revealed. It occurred to me that storytime is a challenge of patience and good listening – a narrated story without moving images, interactive buttons or even, sometimes, pictures and pages to prod. Her fidgetiness doesn’t mean the art is lost, just that it has to be practiced.

So while news hour stories covering teen texting addictions and the demise of paper books to iPads and Kindles are getting parents and the establishment all afluster, here’s something to consider: Aren’t we writing more than ever before? Almost everyone has a blog. My husband’s teen niece is a prolific writer, her blog widely read as she types her own sequel to a highly popular cat-themed young adult series. She’s read all the titles in print, and so, at thirteen, inseparable from her mobile phone, texting at the speed of light, and active with a whole community of online games, she’s on Chapter 33 of her own novel. Cue applause.

All About My Father

2010-07-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

My father is fighting an affliction. Or more accurately, a nemesis. Those of us with gravel driveways will have experienced the satisfaction of a newly topped up drive with that extra deep, extra crunchy-under-foot appeal. He was certainly pleased as punch until suspicious little mountains started to appear. Unfortunately, one man’s pristine beach-golden driveway also doubles as a feline’s answer to the world’s biggest cat box. These gravel domes were not fairies constructing shrines, but the next-door neighbour’s cat attempting a cover up.

I bring this up because we’ve had a good laugh at my father’s attempts to thwart the offending behaviour. He was out there armed with a spray bottle of water and vinegar, but the little minx liked to make midnight deposits. At the risk of becoming a curtain twitcher, he invested in a cat deterrent system, one which makes an inaudible sound offensive only, apparently, to cats. And it certainly seems to work. Although little defecation mountains continue to crop up, they’re just outside the product’s range so at least trips to and from cars are no longer ungainly leaps through a minefield.

Enjoying their retirement, and knowing my parents are nature lovers, I thought I’d shipped a genius present for my father’s birthday: a multi-pronged bird feeder and bath. What could be more peaceful than the simple pleasure of watching wildlife lured to your window? Except I had neglected to anticipate the stealth moves of squirrels stealing peanuts and suet balls. While I might have chalked it up to Darwinian survival of the fittest, I underestimated my father who, fresh from his victory over the cat, had renewed vigour for battle. Lengths of slippery drainpipe went up, first one, then more, which worked out but did nothing for the overall aesthetic. Far from the relaxation I had envisioned, bird watching would now be a sport of pitted wits with wily squirrels scrabbling over an obstacle course and my father obsessing over new tactics to show them who’s boss.

Back home, as part of our strategy to tart up the exterior, the patio is down, the hilly lawn has been re-graded and a new pergola sits prettily over a lovely pea-stone look out. Over morning coffee, I saw one of our dogs perfecting a well-honed nose nudge in the pea-stone. It’s his trademark move while face deep in the cat litter so it immediately had my attention. And then, in the distance, I saw a little mound. Trowel in hand I dug it up and knew the cat battle had come to our door. Since we have two cats, I immediately adopted the vinegar and water spray bottle phase. If we have to invest in a cat deterrent for the brawling nocturnal wild west that occurs nightly, I’ll have to make a decision over which side of enemy lines our own cats will fall.

Paternal similarities don’t end there. Home improvements are often held up by my obsessive research and re-measuring – a trait my husband has noted in all my family and one completely at odds with his eyeball, “how ’bout here” approach to measurement. The bigger challenge is that I want everything new to look as though it’s been there forever, and every neatly laid stone to look weather worn and a bit uneven. I might slop yogurt on stone so it looks aged and yet I am slightly maddened that the lines of the patio are all slightly off centre which causes me to poke and prod in an utterly fruitless way as though I can effect some sort of radical change.

At least I am not alone in my fastidiousness. We picked up one of those faux fountains, a fiberglass imitation of Italianate stone with a three charming faux-copper spigots protruding from the bas-relief of a lion’s head. Having gone this route, I was pretty thrilled the thing looked so convincingly authentic. Getting it home was the first hurdle since it was close to a washing machine in box size and weight, but having ripped apart its giant shipping box, we nearly passed out from the rush of fumes. The sticky varnish had melted its own polystyrene packaging. And to add insult to injury, our faux moss finish was only on the upright portion and not the decidedly light base. Two fountain bases later, we made off with the store model – the only one that matched – and rushed home to find the poles connecting top to bottom wouldn’t line up. And there it was, like a line drawn in the dark. Tumbleweeds blew across the patio, a lone cowboy whistled a theme song and my husband was transformed into John Wayne. Jaw set, he set about heating poles, wielded tongs, crushing pipes with pliers and pretty much whaling on the thing in the middle of the night ‘til chunks fell off and it irreversibly came together. And in winning that fight, who’d now question his readiness to take on the cats?

Slice of Americana

2010-07-07T16:41:00.001-04:00

Despite my obvious association with the wrong camp on Independence Day, I am inevitably drawn to the arts and crafts fun of a slice of Americana, a quintessential July 4th village parade. From its start at the old firehouse to the be-ribboned and deftly corralled hounds of the hunt club, this is American fare at its best. Even if the self-appointed and tongue-in-cheek town beauty is a few years more senior than you might be expecting, it only adds to the quirky flavour. And that enthusiastic Manhattan weekenders swell the parade ranks by half is proof of the allure of traditions from yesteryear and the common desire to feel connected to simple things, like old-fashioned lemonade and the summers of our youth.

The paraders may have been marching in colourfully patriotic clothes manufactured in China and sold by big box corporations, but every child’s wagon was lovingly decorated by hand – ships and aeroplanes - and lavishly festooned with crepe ribbons, shiny balloons, and miniature American flags, while little Uncle Sams beamed with delight and tossed candy to the applauding crowds. The gaggle of children dressed as a big top circus troupe complete with a moustached with strong man and ringmaster were the icing on the cake.

In keeping with our own annual tradition, our cars were packed beyond all capacity expectations to beeline north to Lake George for our own interpretation of independence: camping on an island for a day of boating and grazing with only sun, stars and fireworks overhead. Despite schlepping in coolers of food, more than a few creature comforts, and a small arsenal of celebratory cocktails by boat, it still counts as roughing it in my book; sleeping in tents, bathing in the lake and fighting off ants and hungry mosquitos. So what if it took two round-trips to deliver all our gear to the island, we’re still communing with nature, even if only as nouveau-ruralists.

This lake holds a particular place in my heart acting as a sort of crucible of memories for the fourteen years I’ve spent in New York. Nearly every summer since grad school has been written in some measure on this lake from painting houses in a bikini (yes, that’s true) to running an inn, and now camping with first one, then two, small offpsring. Skittering across the water on the bow of a boat, the forever wild mountains encircling the lake seem to shout out suggestions which ricochet and echo across the bay: past loves, blazing fights, bright futures, near death encounters, bleaching summer sun and fatal lightening strikes, my first striped bass catch, tangling with those blindly dipping bats, a million inky skies and lazily watching glassy water turn black under a sinking sun. All these thoughts are churned up by the prop to froth about in the boat’s wake. A storm in a teacup and a realization of the march of time, like meeting your former self face to face.

Since it’s a place that is as old as my stay in the United States, I feel a sort of ownership. If I’m to be caught up celebrating America’s 235 of independence from British rule with my half-British, half-American progeny at my side, what better place to be than a historically-charged lake that feels like home. Maybe it’s the spirits of native Americans on the wind who demand no-one take sides or assign blame. At least I’m not rolling my eyes at the fist-pumping and slanging matches between drunken celebrants outdoing each another with screams of “USA!”. (Nor, I might add, ejecting drunken louts from our tent on one of those multiple occupancy island. At that point I despaired no place would ever be safe from patriotic boozehounds.) Maybe it’s the laws of nature reminding us no-one has control. Or maybe it’s our own willingness to let go just for a while, without access to the wider world, even by cellphone, and recharge ourselves in a nod to a simpler life and some basic skills of survival. Either way, happy birthday, America!