biscuit of drunkards
September 28, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
i can’t eat another grilled cheese on rye sandwich. please, no. it’s not that they sound good at all when i’m making them, it’s that if i have to do anything that takes longer than three minutes to make then everyone in the house will just have to forget about it. i buy food and look at it, think about making it, and then when it’s time to cut the onion, to defrost, to do anything more than throw it in the direction of the flaming burner on the stove, i sigh, walk away, eat apples, string cheese, and the now utterly odious grilled cheese on rye. ernie tries to help, but hot dogs and chinese take-out are what he makes best, and even describing the steps necessary to make black beans. from a can. is more than i can muster.
henry exclaims that the chicken part nuggets and fries he is eating for the second time this week is “the greatest food i’ve ever eaten!” they sit in booths in fast food restaurants pointing out that the man just over on the other side of the very short wall is “soooooo FAT!” as the man chomps down into a formidable triple stacked hamburger. we rush away without frostys because i am out of apologetic smiles since i’ve been offering them to my family as we sit down to each and every meal of grilled cheese, cheese toast, mac & cheese, cheese on crackers, cheese and rice.
thank you, quaker oats, for life cereal that can be eaten three times a day. thank you, God, for bananas, apples, the smell of pineapple that makes me at least buy one for ernie to cut. thank you, great wall, for general tso and sticky rice. thank you, october, and the promised birth of this baby, for being just a few days away.
give me your answer, do
September 26, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
love
nutella
white sheets, blankets, pillows
satie
listening to little boys searching everywhere for me while playing hide & seek
adventures in mini-vans
dreams about childbirth
boys making bricks, listening to boring speeches about militia life, stickying up the place with rock candy
gum snapping
faces in places (via swiss miss)
hate
ants, their long and industrious trails, discovering them in the laundry room in the morning because we failed to take the trash all the way out
the walmart on wade hampton on saturdays and the horrible remembrance of all of that denim
finding fruit snacks stuck in unfortunate places
begging
people who think they know it all
dreams about childbirth
jude’s craziness in the late afternoon
the neon lights are pretty
September 22, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
hot again today. we try to nap during lady and the tramp and the room fills with a baking kind of sunshine. the air switches back on and ernie slams the windows shut. jude drops his ice cream sandwich in the yard and doesn’t want to stay outside. partly because he doesn’t have an ice cream sandwich anymore, partly because “it’s too hot, dad, it’s burning my body.”
shoot!
we watch lawrence welk tonight, swirling, smiling people who look like they should be sweating beneath all of those synthetic fibers and ben-nye make-up creams, but who only glow instead: glow of lights, gleam of teeth, glimmer of instrument and polished shoe. the girls who dress alike are deemed twins. henry thinks he can tap dance but it’s uncoordinated and goofy. jude scowls at the screen because he needs to eat and go to bed. i impress them both with my embarrassing knowledge of the lyrics of many of the songs performed tonight.
at the grocery store today a woman turns, gasps, exclaims, “what a beautiful child!” at jude who is still wearing part of the ice cream sandwich that he didn’t drop.
i always swore i wouldn’t take my kids places without stopping and, with a simple motion of a hand and a cloth, wipe their little faces until they were pink and clean. this is why we shouldn’t swear to many things in life. i also said i would never subject my kids to a “spit scrub” which involves the licking of my thumb and the scrubbing of their faces with it. time after time, being washed so horribly, while sitting in the white station wagon (the one with the backseat that had the wire sticking out of the piping on the side near one of the doors so that if you weren’t careful you ripped the bottom of your thigh bloody when hopping into the car), i promised myself that i would never spit scrub my kids, that there must be a better way than making them spend the rest of the afternoon with a face that felt dry with mother spit. i feel guilty even now for the handful of times i’ve done it to henry and jude. oddly, they’ve never complained about this, but i’ve hunted them down with a washcloth, listening to their protestations a multitude of times. maybe it’s a girl thing.
“i’ll bet you hear that all of the time,” she says, staring at jude while i look at the broccoli and then back at her. “thank you,” i say. i wish i would remember how beautiful he is when he’s flailing around screaming at me. big emotions are hard to see beyond sometimes, the glaring and unwanted looming taller than the infinite universe of spirit inside him.
watch, wait
September 21, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
it seems that cooler days are here to stay, no more toying around with us, the afternoons, even, cool to the touch. we switched off the air gleefully the other day and the house whirrs again with the spin of the fans, the swish and siren of the traffic, the chirruping of the summer remaining for a few more weeks. even the trees are rosy in the night air. the empty house across the street, the one with the saggy clothesline used religiously by the previous tenants, the one with the dogwood that bloomed in terraced white all spring as i looked across our empty front yard, the other tree, the one in the front of the empty house is nearly covered in red already. the pecan trees in our yard have spots of yellow here, there, seen best from directly under the tree while looking straight up through branches to sky.
the backyard is quiet now that school has started, the neighbors behind us, those with the pool, the grandchildren sit at desks all day and dream of tricks and treats and a faraway christmas.
two and a half weeks until the baby comes to us, one way or another. we need to make the annoying purchase of a carseat, but all else is washed and folded and ready. of all baby things in the house, i’m most excited about the didymos that i bought from kristen, and putting the baby into it. and the knitted orange boots sharon brought to me from germany. i’m anxious to smell this baby’s head, to watch this baby yawn, to hear this baby cry. jude is not ready. henry is curiously ready. ernie and i are probably not ready, the explosions in our days volcanic and unpredictable already.
silently sharing the same fears
September 18, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
love
ernie folding the scary amounts of clean laundry (stacked in a basket tower in front of the closet) while i was out. by myself. rummaging at thrift stores.
surprising afternoon gifts of addictive garlicky hummus from a dear mama friend who understands
new babies and first-time parents
the power of the oreo that makes piles of vegetables, grains, and legumes disappear from dinner plates
organizing jars of coins, paper clips, pencils, game pieces
knock knock jokes!
finding polaroid cameras for three dollars each
online scrabble
special edition martha stewart halloween issue and other deliciously scary ideas
hate
when sixty minutes lasts much longer than its alloted sixty, bumping what we really want to watch until 8:50
the way the top corner of the sheet slips off of the mattress on occasion
impossible decisions
the embarrassing number of catch-all jars, bowls, and cups found around the house
explaining the idea of whippings and punishments while reading “farmer boy” to henry
telemarketers who call late enough to make me think it’s someone with important news on the line
being a crabby wench
the excruciating pressure of the moth
September 14, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
lights were flipped on in the early morning dim and dark and were still burning throughout the house even though the sky was yawning with the great morning and spitting out a gray light over the drear, the dank. the street, in stiff new stripes, watered last night at a time unknown, when i couldn’t fall back to sleep, listening to the irregular ping and splatter on the windows, the deck, the car, the street was staying busy with too many cars and trucks, busy about getting their days of work, the monotonous, the tedious, all the more so on a morning like today’s.
yesterday it was gray, too, cloudy and promising. we spend much of it with melanie and her boys, the trampoline for bouncing, toys we’ve never seen before, donut glaze dried to fingers for the licking. it’s hard to say no to such things.
we thrifted a bit today, the creepy coming out for october costuming. we buy a scary mask after jude chases the clerk through the store while wearing it. i like thrift stores early in the day when no one is there. i like to be places when other people aren’t there yet. another early thrifter was there buying bolts and bolts of upholstery fabric. i tried not to think that getting everyone buckled in, unbuckled and out, not to mention dressed and fed and watered, is what prevented me from filling my own cart with fabric before this frizzy haired and unshowered woman could do so. she was not held up by love and chaos as i was and, one day, this will be me, early and fabric-lucky with a quiet house and time and space to finish sewing projects of all kinds. will there be dandelions given to me then? and someone whose favorite thing in the world is to try to beat me at endless games of checkers? sometimes it’s hard to be content with this life, days lined up like dominoes, falling in the same way with the same clicking sound into the next and the next.
one wild and precious life
September 12, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
love
dark mornings
waking up before anyone else
the creak of the floors becoming familiar
henry’s description of his dreams
long hours at the park and on other climbing equipment
being well, doing good work, keeping in touch
hate
colds, coughing, the constant blowing of the nose
searching for things i know! i just put down right here! and not being able to find them
soggy towels on the bathroom floor
the whisking away of the lego table before the replacement is here and the subsequent lego mess strewn about the house
stepping on legos
hauling this huge pregnant stomach around while crawling on the floor to find legos henry missed due to the camouflage the living room rug provides
accidentally vacuuming up unique legos and having to sift through the dust of the vacuum to retrieve them
spend his little breakfast
September 9, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
dear september,
thank you for the leaves that yellow early and swing down in a yellow flash onto the gravel, the grass, the wood on the bridge over the creek that jude tosses handfuls of purchased rocks over, into, beyond. thank you for the coming of school and the way the playgrounds are now nearly empty in the mornings when we scavenge for pine cones and sticks in the shape of pistols, rifles, bows and arrows. thank you for the mere sound of your name that makes the morning seem cooler so that being outdoors is not so hideous a thought as it was a mere fortnight ago.
september, we even thank you for the real nothingness of your month, the month that is not summer and is not fall, the month that could be stricken from the calendar and no one would really care much at all about the loss of you, the month before we realize that summer is gone and that winter is coming, the month during which the sun still burns without mercy and yet during which we are able to deceive ourselves into thinking that the wind has changed and that we really do need to buy that sweater even though it’s not on sale at all.
we thank you for new pencils and knitting needles and the beginning of new things, like music and soccer. we thank you for coffee in the evenings, sipped outdoors without the flush of the face that sends you back inside for something over ice, instead. we thank you for new fall television programming.
we thank you, september, for breakfasts spent morning glory gazing, for plans and promise and clean new calendars for the school year, for okra and the last tomatoes of the season.
guacamole
September 7, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
for some ridiculous reason, years ago, when we replaced our funky swirled green dishes with fiestaware, it did not occur to me that henry, an agreeable not-yet two-year-old, and jude, a face and sparkle unknown that swished around in the dark inside of me, would argue, as though their very lives depended on it, over the color of plate on which they would eat their food.
they are very consistent about this arrangement they have, changing the color they’ve bookmarked as a favorite on a whim to be (perchance!) the very color that the other has sitting in front of him. many meals have i served to them on plastic plates of the same color to avoid having to find something fair, something reasonable, with which they will be, at the very least, pacified. tonight i thought that, over educated girl that i am, i can surely discover a peaceful way to use real dishes without having to interfere with a shout and a crabby lecture about being careful with dishes that are made of ceramic. i asked jude, who was helping in the kitchen, which color of plate he would like to use, showing him the stack of dishes, all colors, in a stack on the shelf. he chooses bumblebee because every bright yellow object, including, of course, cars, must be a transformer these days, even though he really doesn’t have the slightest idea how cool bumblebee really happens to be. i tell him to ask henry which color he wants, knowing that henry does not know to choose the yellow plate in order to beguile jude into a fist fight on the bedroom floor. henry says, “green,” and jude walks into the kitchen to announce that he still wants bumblebee but that henry wants avocado.
i’m so glad to have found a solution to the “this is not my favorite color for my dinnerplate” problem and to know that i have at least taught jude (at an early age, to boot) the useful, yet oft overlooked and underestimated, ability to think in color.
dreams of flying
September 6, 2007 | Filed Under ordinary | Leave a Comment
this series of wings and jumps and impossibility makes me want to spend the day staging dreams and drinking something blue. it’s a lot harder to do this than it looks, ask godzilla and the butterfly net and the boys who didn’t want to lie still in the sunshiney grass. maybe because it involves kids and the inevitable ideas they need to interject. and when bribery with circus peanuts won’t even work to keep them still in position long enough for me to find a high spot and take a picture, then it’s clear that it’s time to give up.
(for some reason, the ghostbusters pic is my favorite — wonderful!)