October Gave a Party . . .

Today is the epitome of a gorgeous fall day. Walk out the door and the world feels alive and electric. I've gotten more done effortlessly today that I do in a week of gloomy, rainy weather dragging myself from chore to chore. Days like this remind me of a poem I learned when I was a little girl. It started, 'October gave a party . . .' hence my title. And October always felt like a party month to me as I reveled in the weather and planned for Halloween, my high holiday, as I've always called it. It's usually a whirlwind of costume making, decorating, parties and some amazing weekends in Salem, Massachusetts.

But this year with the boy being too old to dress up, the main event party I usually attend canceled due to home renovations, and no Salem trip planned, I've got nothing! No agonizing over what to be, no fabric and make-up to buy, no sewing and gluing and swapping personas for a day! Nothing. I will have to content myself this year by looking back at pictures of some of my favorite costumes and handing out treats to the little princesses, ghosts and other creatures that come my way. A lot less work, but also a lot less fun!

Look at a few of my pictures with me and enjoy the rest of the poem:

October's Party
By: George Cooper

October gave a party;
The leaves by hundreds came—
The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples,
And leaves of every name.
The Sunshine spread a carpet,
And everything was grand,
Miss Weather led the dancing,
Professor Wind the band.

The Chestnuts came in yellow,
The Oaks in crimson dressed;
The lovely Misses Maple
In scarlet looked their best;
All balanced to their partners,
And gaily fluttered by;
The sight was like a rainbow
New fallen from the sky.

Then, in the rustic hollow,
At hide-and-seek they played,
The party closed at sundown,
And everybody stayed.
Professor Wind played louder;
They flew along the ground;
And then the party ended
In jolly "hands around."

Happy Halloween!

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

Since Ireland, I've been on some kind of personal journey back in time. I've been thinking about and trying to recover old music from iTunes. I've cleaned out and reorganized my desk and bookshelves and searched through hundreds of photos from childhood and on through the years. Ordinarily, I don't make time for looking back. I have no idea what's gotten into me, but I've decided to go with it because the net result has been reclaiming usable house space and, unexpectedly, lots of reminiscence both good and bittersweet.

The best rediscovery by far has been a box of letters and keepsakes that I had not opened in 20 years.  My own private time capsule. I'd saved report cards and papers from elementary school through college. Greeting cards, of course! Mementos from my high school days as a House Page in the U.S. House of Representatives. A Congressional Record signed by Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill. An autograph from Dudley Moore that he surrendered in FAO Schwartz where a crazy friend from Arkansas, my Irish twin and I accosted him one day.

Mom

But better than all these goodies were the letters. Hundreds of them. Despite the fact that I spent five hours straight going through them all one day, I've only read a smattering so far. My sister, herself, now a US Ambassador unwittingly created a snap-shot of history by chronicling her first tour of duty in Johannesburg, South Africa during apartheid in monthly letters to me. My Irish twin sister regaled me while I was away in Washington with hilarious anecdotes from home, highlighting the activities of my parents', our friends, herself and even the dog. Rereading the letters from my mother now, who we lost before I got married or became a parent, opens up a new understanding of the fervency of her love for me and the worries I caused her. In one note, she thanks me for not just loving her, but telling her so. Nineteen years gone and she's still making me feel good about myself.

Family you expect to be constant, but I am particularly lucky in that some of my very best friends in the world then remain as near and dear today. I think I will invite each one over individually to share these old treasures and see if we can recall the circumstances, the characters referred to, the love interests and the shared jokes even now with our minds addled by age. Other correspondents I've lost touch with, but may look up on facebook to see what they're doing. In an interesting twist, the least riveting letters now were the ones I'd have looked forward to the most back in the day--the all-important love letters!

One thing that struck me about so many of the letters was how well-written and genuinely entertaining they were. Writing letters and striving to make them interesting or funny was something we all did. A cliche like, "don't forget to write," wasn't just a joke. That IS how we kept in touch--male and female. Unfortunately, it is an art form that we have all but lost with the advent of email and cell phones. Few 20-somethings today will have a treasure trove like mine to open during their mid-life reckonings. In a way, it seems like life is a far more superficial enterprise altogether now. In writing letters, we shared a part of ourselves. We opened up and committed to paper our thoughts, observations and our feeling in a way that isn't imaginable today. In being apart from someone then, we might actually have become closer than ever through letters. Now, we just lose touch.

If you've got one of these boxes lurking around your attic, I encourage you to take a chilly winter's day and devote it to reacquainting yourself with your youth. You may find references to things you'd quite forgotten about yourself (I must have sent homemade cookies to people on a weekly basis, though I don't remember ever doing so!). If you're young now and the only correspondence you get comes via email, I suggest you print them out and put them into a box for safekeeping. Years from now and 10 PCs later, you won't have anything to look back on if you don't. 

Ireland . . . Forever

I've just spent the last week driving around the west of Ireland with herself, my sister, listening to Irish music and photographing landscapes, livestock and monastic ruins. The roads were hair-raisingly narrow, bendy and enigmatically marked. It rained much of the time and the temperature seldom crested 70  degrees except in the humid confines of our rather small rental car. Our flip-flops were inadequate, sunscreen unnecessary and swim suits completely irrelevant. Each night we were tired from a long day's slog, but each morning we soldiered on in the quest to drink in as much of the countryside as possible in the short time we had. Of an evening we enjoyed a bit of music, a bit of craic and I'll admit, a bit of whiskey. I realize this isn't the conventional picture of a great vacation, but I'd turn around and go back in a heartbeat to spend several weeks more doing the exact same thing. So, I know, would anyone who has been there and done the same already.

The plane carrying my corporeal self arrived back on Sunday, and it's Wednesday now. But, my thoughts and my dreams are still running to the wilds of Connemara marveling at the beauty of the low-hanging clouds on the hilltops, the flowing mountain streams and lush wildflowers. Either that or I'm on a clifftop in Clare gazing out at the ocean and feeling the uncompromising wind that trains the branches of the trees to point forever inland. It is an amazing phenomenon to become more accustomed than not to finding a soul-moving vista around nearly every bend. And it's an unwelcome adjustment when it all ends.

In Ireland, the west in particular, the terrain is so uncluttered that the map relates directly to what you are looking at out the car window. When you meander through the remains of a 12th-century monastery, it isn't so very difficult to imagine what it was like when it was up and running because essentially what you see from the now ruined windows is what was always here. You can travel a secondary road for 15 minutes without encountering another vehicle and in the more remote reaches, you might never see another one. Of course, we avoided the obvious tourist sites we've already seen--you can't avoid crowds everywhere. But it's easy to get off the beaten path and well worth it.

I'm excited about spending the upcoming week at the beach. The ease and sultry warmth of our American summer will be a welcome contrast to the rain and cool of Ireland. I ought to get packing, but I've frittered away my time the last few days fine tuning my pictures, captioning them and uploading them to share. I've looked up and read about the ruins we visited. I've dug out photos from previous trips, comparing, remembering and reliving. I've found my old cassette tapes and looked for my celtic favorites on iTunes. I have yet to reset my watch to the correct time. In short, I'm doing everything I can to resist getting back to normal. I prefer to wonder whether or not the cows in Ireland ever get to go inside than to think about what to make for dinner. Sorting out old photos really beats sorting laundry. Transporting myself through time to envision a bustling medieval community of friars beats transporting the boy to his various amusements.

But I am back and I must grab hold of myself. There are things to do, places to go and people to meet. For now, I will leave Ireland latent in my mind . . . until next time. I hope it's soon.

Boy Meets World

At a get-together last week, the day the heart-breaking truth of what had become of the little Brooklyn boy Leibby Kletzky came out, a discussion cropped up about a family--relatives, I think of my host and hostess--allowing their 12-year-old son to travel by train into Jersey City unaccompanied by an adult for a daily program at the same high school the boy will coincidentally be attending in September. There was strong condemnation all around for any mode of getting around by kids of any age and at any time of day other than riding in a car driven by their parents. For me, it was one of those, "hello, I'm sitting right here and can HEAR YOU moments," as everyone who was there knows the boy takes the train every day, too. Whether or not they were intending to send me a message of either concern or disapproval notwithstanding, I got to thinking about why I am willing to let the boy board a train in the 'burbs, transfer in Newark and land ultimately in Jersey City when others think it unimaginable.

My father tells me stories all the time about the various sights he'd see and adventures he'd have when at the age of 6 or 7, he would board a trolley in Jersey City all alone to visit his grandmother in Hoboken. By age 9 or 10 he was leading other kids on expeditions to Coney Island via Ferry and the NYC subway. To these stories, I react as my friends did--with disapproval of my grandmother's judgement. He'll say, but times were different. I'll think, but weirdos still existed. Then I remembered that I was riding buses in Jersey City with a same-age friend at age 10 and it didn't seem so outlandish anymore (OK, 6 or 7 still does).

Are there weirdos out there? Absolutely. By and large are they going to capture kids and dismember them? No. Will the boy encounter the occasional deviant, a menacing-looking stranger, an aggressive pan-handler, a would-be pickpocket, a dealer offering drugs? I think so. He has already. But I rode the train everyday as a young woman--aka a magnet for weirdos--and these encounters were scant and manageable. By and large, riders of public transportation are just people getting to where they are going. I think in the rarefied world of the suburbs, people tend to forget this. Kids are so insulated from the real world that a train full of strangers becomes a train full of predators. If the parents think so, the kids will certainly think so.

Both the girl and the boy will drone on about my overprotectiveness over the years. And yes, I've pointed out every scary edge they could fall off, every germ potential they might encounter and the uselessness of every lightweight coat they've ever worn. I can't think about the girl driving too much and feel like I should medicate myself when either of them are flying. The mayor and I were a wreck when the boy started riding the train last year. The mayor would call me when he spotted him heading toward the train, spying on him from his office window in Jersey City, and I'd call him back when "the package" alighted again in town. But, the boy never knew it. He felt the confidence we had in his ability to negotiate his expanding world, even if we didn't fully at first. And I think that is a part of our job as parents, to guide our children incrementally toward independence and self-confidence. In that regard (and in many other regards) we cannot help but revel in our success with the girl. She breaks boundaries and succeeds beyond our wildest expectations every day. We expect nothing less of the boy and are preparing him accordingly.

While I fervently hope I don't live to regret the chances I allow the boy to take, I prefer that risk to having him live to regret chances he was too timid to take because I made him that way.

Sounding Off

Last month I promised (threatened) to write about all the things that annoy me about living in the suburbs. But I have decided to reduce it to one overriding complaint--NOISE. I have a low tolerance for noise. As a result of the pressures in my head from coughing throughout my babyhood, I lost an eardrum in my right ear. Hearing in my left ear will not win a prize, either, but I do not seem or feel impaired. I put it down to the concept that you can't miss what you never had. Doctors have offered me hearing aids promising great results, but I am loathe to follow through. I have always lived in a quiet world and I really like it here.

Enter the suburbs. I have never been more bothered by noise than I am living here. Perhaps it is the constantly shattered expectation of quiet that makes this worse by far than the city, but it is undeniably worse. Right now for example, I'm am sitting in a lovely spot of my own creation. My little backyard has a pretty redwood deck festooned with flowers and plants--all my favorite varieties, comfy outdoor furniture and my bird feeders. My freshly bathed dogs are by my side and I can look beyond my computer screen to a lovely little, newly mulched garden beyond. The only sound is the faint tinkling of a delicate glass wind chime, bird chatter and a dog barking in the distance. It's all the paradise I need. And yet, it is frequently off limits to me on account of NOISE. Any minute, and I can never know when, a landscaper's truck might pull up and in the blink of an eye it's paradise lost. There seem to be no limits as to when someone can make noise, how loud it can get and how long it can last. Landscapers arrive across the street as early as 7:30 AM ready to assault nature and my quietude with full mowers, blowers, whackers and trimmers ablaze. Sit out on a Sunday morning and there's no stopping a neighbor from marching out to the garage and firing up every noisy device therein. Today as I filled my coffee cup intending to drink it al fresco, an enormous truck parked outside the house and idled for about 40 minutes as it made a delivery of God knows what using a forklift. I am sure whatever was deposited in my neighbor's driveway is going to result in even more noise as it is built, installed or applied. Yesterday it was a different neighbor with a power-washer that drove me indoors. It never ends.

And it's not just me being overly sensitive. It's become a running joke among the Mayor, the boy and me. No sooner do we get comfortable outside than boom, we encounter some form of decibel challenge. I would have thought that my reduced hearing would make this all the more bearable for me, but it doesn't. All the hearing loss has done is make me appreciate a quiet world that increasingly does not exist. Shopping at the mall the other day for the boy amid the insistent, obnoxious music at Hollister and Aeropostale had me running  home for the xanax. We recently spend a beautiful day at Great Adventure where my only problem all day was that there was no place to come in from the loud voices and piped music.

In my mind, the greatest hero of the present day is going to be the person who invents the silent motor that powers all the lawn taming, hedge trimming, debris clearing devices we use to beat our environments into submission. In fact, I think that same individual ought to be considered for the Nobel PEACE prize.



Divine Rituals of the Suburbs

Over the years I've made no secret of the fact that I feel living in the suburbs is a disappointing letdown from city life. In fact, it's a dead horse I've beaten to such a tedious degree that I'm surprised the Mayor hasn't already relegated me to an efficiency apartment somewhere in downtown Jersey City just to shut me up. I'll have to keep beating.

Some day, I'll blog about everything I dislike about suburbia, but today I am singing its praises. For we are in the midst of suburbia's high holy days--truly spiritual days of searching the dark recesses, purging and purifying and hopefully by the end of it feeling deeply cleansed and reborn. On Saturday we paid homage as a town to Our Lady of the Immaculate Garage. We asked ourselves the hard questions, "Will Nana hate me from heaven for getting rid of her old toaster oven? Surely there's no chance of me being 'blessed' with another baby, is there?  And isn't it some kind of sin for a family of four that's down to three in the house to own and store eight bicycles?" Days we spent in preparation--sorting, cleaning, carting and pricing our meager, dust-covered offerings and laying them on the sacrificial tables of the Borough-wide Garage Sale. Pilgrims from all over town and the towns nearby filed solemnly by street by street, yard by yard, offering alms for the once sacred symbols and now sad relics of our devoted consumerism. It was an exhausting, yet gloriously gratifying event. Nary a soul came away from the day without feeling a great weight lifted from them. And yet, it was just the beginning, a mere precursor to the main holiday that will occur on Thursday.

I refer, of course, to The Feast of St. Bulk--the bulk trash pick-up extravaganza we look forward to every year at least as much as, if not more than Thanksgiving. In fact, and excuse me for being somewhat irreverent, but we probably ought to subtitle it, ThanksTaking. With the powers that be smiling down upon us, we can divest ourselves of everything we do not want any longer. Big things, small things, ugly raunchy things that we cannot believe still exist in the temples of our daily life can be placed on the side of the road and will miraculously ascend into the belly of a giant beast that takes them away forever. Friends and relatives from other towns must beat back the dual temptations of envy and the desire to lay their junk at our curb. One must keep them strong in their resistance, for it is wrong for them to covet their neighbor's Bulk Day and illegal for them to participate. The Feast of St. Bulk attracts its own pilgrims, too, but it's a leaner, meaner crowd. They come on a mission with their trucks and vans, leaving their loved ones at home, to forage for the holy grail of garbage.

All in all, it's an exhausting week of service and sacrifice. In the end, one always asks oneself, "Could I have done more, contributed more, worked harder or turned away from more earthly possessions?" Occasionally, there are regrets and recriminations--"how could you have thrown away that fish tank I've owned since I was ten? What kind of heartless daughter of Satan tosses a box of well worn, once loved stuffed animals?" But within a few days, a feeling of calm and contentment takes over as we forget not only that we gave things up, but that we ever owned them in the first place. We walk into our attics and garages without tripping and begin thinking of all kinds of new crap we can buy to fill up all that space. Ah, Suburbia!

Going Veg--It Ain't Easy

Try as I might, I cannot get the hang of this vegetarian thing. I know people do this everyday with ease and, in fact, just had a conversation about this with a college friend who said multiple times, "being a vegetarian is pretty easy, really." And that is possibly true if the factors that make my conversion so confounding are not present--namely, still having meat eaters to feed every night, disliking in the extreme most of the meat substitutes I have found and maintaining an attempt to limit carbohydrates, too, so that I don't become the world's fattest vegetarian. There is also the little problem of still liking the taste of meat--the only reason I'm eliminating it is because if you do any research at all, you find that factory farming is plain and simple just another phrase for animal torture.

I looked into humanely raised and slaughtered meat and it's a great option for anyone who is able to pay 2-3 times as much for their meat as they would for factory farmed meat. That's not an option for me. So back to square one: dealing with vegetables. I am not a great cook and I am not a foodie. I did start out liking to cook. But, for me, the fun went out the exhaust fan when it became my job to feed people other than myself on a daily basis. The restrictions of catering to everybody's likes and dislikes are incredibly tedious. It leaves very little room for creativity when regardless of what you decide to make, you are faced with somebody's disappointment. Except occasionally when entertaining, I seldom delight in cooking anymore. Out of necessity, I became a competent and fairly healthy cook. I can consistently put a tasty, decent and balanced meal on the table in an hour or less. But, all of my repertoire is either meat-based or involves pasta. Take those staples away and I got nothing.

At the heart of my problem is the mindset that it should be quick and easy. As a result of not enjoying making dinner, I've compartmentalized it to the point where I can't readily conceive of it taking more than an hour. Anything beyond that is too much trouble and an expansion of a chore I already dislike. In my mind, I liken it to rediscovering how to do laundry by hand--uh, no thanks! Whether it is or it isn't, I regard it as a lot of trouble to take a bunch of fresh beets and trim, peel, cook and prepare them. Draining an eggplant for however long it takes is a recipe deal-killer. This is what I have to change. I have to find some way to rediscover what is fun about cooking. Time is sometimes a consideration in my life, but not always. It doesn't necessarily need to be quick. Right now, I look at any time spent cooking as time away from things I like to do. Can I learn to like it again? I don't know. But I've got to try. I can't go back to meat; I can't eat veggie burgers all the time (I hate them). At least for now, I have to cook meat for the boy (the mayor's game for anything, but likes his meat, too). But I also have to find vegetarian recipes that are healthy and delicious and tack them on to my regular cooking. I have to learn to feed myself again after all these years of eating whatever is easiest and receives the fewest complaints. Let me go get that eggplant out of the vegetable bin. I'll drain it and see what happens.