Behold, my son in his Pirate Sweater!

Get a good eyeful, because it’s likely the first and last time he will ever wear it.   I finished it in time for the weather to warm up, and even though it’s only cotton, I am thinking that it won’t manage to stay on him for any temperature over 75F.  And he will certainly have it outgrown by Fall.

Knitting for kids is an exercise in perfect timing.  The entire time you are working, they are growing, and you just have to project for that perfect alignment of size, weather and dumb luck to get any wear out of it.  Likely I will have this little photo memory, and Harry’s cousin, Solomon, with have the sweater by fall.

They grow up, and this is just another one of those wistful reminders.

Ah.  Well.  The moment was worth it.

I wish I could, but no, I am feeding just about a hundred. My time is taken up with cooking a 5-course dinner for 100 of my closest friends this weekend. I know that catering seems too close to work for a real hobby, but to say I enjoy cooking may be an understatement along the lines of “the Pope is Catholic” or “Robbin loves to knit.” And with a certain level of vanity – I am actually not bad at it. I am not about to open a cafe anytime soon (did I mention I don’t actually like to work on weekends or evenings?), but by and large the number of culinary disasters has been minor.

Anyway, here is the menu:

First Remove – the Warm Up:

Cheese and Sausage Stuffed Bread
Butter

Second Remove – the First Main Course:

Greek Rosemary Grilled Chicken
Spiced Couscous with Pine Nuts and Raisins
Stuffed Grape Leaves

Third Remove – Intermezzo:

Green Salad with Red Onions and Vinagrette
Feta Cheese and Olives
Crisps

Fourth Remove – Second Main Course:

Peppercorn Roast Pork Loin
Honeyed Spice Baby Carrots

Fifth Remove – the Cooldown:

Lime Ices garnished with Mint

And all this – for under $5 a person.

Bon Apetit!

I do try to keep religious holidays religious.  I am not fundamentally threatened by cultural traditions such as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, but we do try to keep them tied into the theological meaning of the holiday despite all attempts of the retail-fueled popular media to the contrary.  We have Christmas down.  I am happy to report that the Baby Jesus was mentioned almost as much as Saint Nick, and that’s about all I can expect from a four-year-old living in arguably the most commercial society in the known universe.

Easter is a bit more of a challenge.  Easter is, well, kind of bloody, really.

The aforementioned attack of fear experienced by my son in response to the aliens-come-bodysnatcher cartoon has seriously hampered my attempts to explain the pivotal symbolic event of our religion.  There is absolutely no possible way to explain Easter to a four-year-old without Christ coming off as a zombie.  None.  He let me get about five minutes into the explanation of the Crucifixion and the miracle at the Tomb, when he blurted out “Mommy, can we talk about something else?” in obvious discomfort.

Of course, I am not sure that the “Be Amazed” video montage in our Easter Sunday praise service helped our cause any.  While not explicitly graphic, the actor representing Jesus did an amazingly good job of portraying the Passion of Christ in every painful facial expression he could muster.  In a world of chocolate eggs, painful death and empty tombs are a hard sell.

We live in a sanitized world and to a great extent, we have sanitized our religion as well.  Christmas is big.  Of course – it’s got babies and presents.  Who can resist babies and presents?  But Easter is the single, defining moment in the Christian faith and while it does celebrate re-birth, the emphasis is on RE-birth.  Which brings us back to the suffering horrible death part.

I have mixed feelings about that reality.  On one hand, every fiber in my being fights to preserve my son’s innocence.   In that, I am a product of my time.  99% of the parents in all of human history did not have that luxury, and somehow we managed to survive long enough to overpopulate ourselves.   We glorify violence at the same time that we almost trip over ourselves to avoid confronting the cycle of life.  Growing up as the daughter of a farmer, I had no illusions about where my food came from, but I am not eager to introduce my son to the fact that his pork chop came from Babe the pig.  It’s hard enough to get him to eat as it is.  He’s about one step away from becoming a vegetarian, and because he doesn’t actually like vegetables, I am afraid that will be the death of him.  I don’t think that many macaroni-and-cheese-atarians make it to the age of reproduction.

I don’t think we glorify either violence or sexuality any more than our distant and not-so-distant predecessors.  In Victorian England, nude photos of children were coveted and displayed in places of pride because they were seen as capturing a window of innocence.  Today we would be appalled, and we strategically cover the important bits when we take the obligatory first-bath photos of infants.  Violence?  14th century Europe had it all over us when it comes to the glorification of violence.    And yet, we are not comfortable confronting the fact that Christianity fundamentally began with bloody martyrdom – at least not in the detail.   Take one look at the media treatment of commercial animal farming, and it becomes painfully obvious that we are not a society that handles the concept of sacrifice well.

I am not sure we serve ourselves well by it.  When we distance ourselves from the particulars of what really constitutes “sacrifice”, we inure ourselves to the bloody reality of it.  Death is neither pretty nor glorious.  It is painful and ugly, no matter how high the purpose it serves.   By separating ourselves from it, I wonder if we are also separating ourselves from the value of it.  We make it easier to take it for granted – to take life itself for granted.  Whether it is the cow on our plate, or the soldier in the field, have we made it easier to waste the gift that is given by the taking of life?  Whether it is the gift of security or nourishment, or redemption, are we more likely to squander it?

I don’t have an answer.

I think, however, I will wait a little longer before I explain the pork chop.

One of the earliest people that encouraged my blog was a fellow scientist mom Whymommy of Toddler Planet.   We had chosen different paths in our efforts to balance motherhood and career and it was refereshing to compare notes.  She is a scientist with NASA, and the mother of two young boys whose ages bracket my son’s.

About a year after we made acquaintance, her life, and the content of her blog, drastically changed.  She was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer (IBC), a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer with a very high recurrence rate.   Her blog became of chronicle of her fight against the disease and her struggle to both promote public awareness and to raise her children with dignity in the face of a grim diagnosis.

I have watched her struggle, seen how surviving the disease has threatened to overcome her life, and how she has worked to forge meaning from it.  Somehow, in the back of my mind, I thought that odds were made for other people, that nobody whose life touched mine would be on the downside of those odds, but recently her cancer has recurred and she is trying to iron her resolve against another possible surgery, another round of chemo, more radiation being poured into her already tired body.  I fear for her.  I ask God daily to grant her that much more time with her boys.

Her fight has tapped deep into the wellspring of my worst fears.

Mid-life is not for sissies.  When you reach that point where the balance between the years behind you and the years before you start to tip into the negative, it’s natural to start more seriously contemplating your finite-ness.  Mortality is serious business.  I know from my conversations with Will, who watched both of his parents decline and pass in the last year, that my near-obsession is not a lonely one.  But when you throw a small child into the mix, the ruminations take on a sense of urgency and stridency that can take your breath away.

My worst fear, the one that shakes my soul, if I am honest, is not death.

It is being taken away from my son.

The eventuality that I will not survive to see my son into the fullness of his manhood is the thought that I cannot follow.  When I do, the fear grips my heart in an icy steel grip that stops my breath until by force of will I banish it from my mind.  I have literally lain gasping in bed at night when the thought of leaving my son motherless has held my breath from me and the tears burned hot in my eyes.

But the flip side of that coin is even more unthinkable.  That my son should precede me in death is beyond imagining.  And there lies one of the fundamental conflicts of parenthood – the conflict between the rock hard belief that nobody, NOBODY can successfully raise your flesh and blood as well as you can, the possessiveness, the aching need to see them achieve their full potential,  and…

…the absolute conviction that you would, despite all of that and without a moment’s hesitation, take the bullet of certain death to save them.

Parenthood is this constant battle of pushing and pulling.   The selfish need to stay alive to see how the story of your child’s life plays out, and the necessity to sacrifice all of it to allow it to happen.  Even in the absence of the heroic bullet scenario, you are in a constant state of letting go from the moment they draw their first breath.  Your entire job is to become unnecessary in bits and pieces,  from weaning, to the first steps, to the first day at school, to the first date.

In an ideal world, they will leave you behind.  In an ideal world, you will be there to celebrate it.

Lord, please let me live to see the day of my own obsolescence.

The detritus of a full week in the sun with no electricity and nominal running water is now filling my kitchen. My lips are peeling, my nails are non-existent and I only felt something approaching truly human after a long, hot soak in a very large mound of bubbles scented with something bearing an exotic floral name.

It was totally worth it.

Totally.

I have joked with my friends that the twin keys of manipulating me are guilt and responsibility.  My entire life has been driven by those two forces.  With apologies to Jodifur, three minutes with me, and you are convinced that I was secretly raised by a Jewish mother, despite my obviously Nordic heritage.

There are few things I regret – vanishingly few.  But there are some private guilts that still haunt me – because they are things I could never make reparations for, never undo, never compensate.

I used to run and bike before my knees decided they were done with me.  I started road biking in the late 80′s and switched to trail biking in the mid-90′s.  To this day, I hate road biking.  I hate the wind of rushing cars, the feeling of restriction to that narrow strip of shoulder, the heat of the pavement, the choking smell of exhaust.  It’s stressful.  But more than that, it brings up one of those guilt ridden memories.

When I moved to Arkansas after my first marriage, I bought a road bike and started to bike around my new city, partially for exercise and partially to explore my new surroundings.   I like to be alone, and more to the point, I like to be alone observing.   Particularly the natural world – even the little bits that passed for “nature” in the middle of the small town-come-suburbia I had moved to.

I was cutting through the grass-interspersed parking lots of the civic center, when a plover and her chicks, traversing across the neutral ground (that’s MEDIAN for all you folks who have never had the good grace to live in New Orleans), stopped me in my path.  Plovers, for all you non-birdwatchers out there, are not particularly remarkable in their plumage, nor are they particularly rare.  What makes them interesting, from a nature watching point of view, is their behavior.

If you get anywhere near their chicks, plovers will suddenly throw themselves into the most amazing display of false death throes imaginable.  They flutter.  They thrash.  They contort.  It’s completely transfixing, which is the point of the entire exercise – while you are watching mom perform the bird equivalent of foaming-at-the-mouth, her babies are running for cover as fast as their little chickie legs will take them.  It’s effective.

Except in this case, it wasn’t.  I lingered, fascinated, trying to follow both mother and chicks, driving them in front of me as I kept trying to get a closer look at them.  The chicks ran away from my perceived threat and straight into the unseen real one – the moving car on the road beside us.

The memory is very vivid, even as I write.  The green grass and the wet brown of dark earth beneath it.  The grey clouds, heavy with impending rain.  The smell of damp pavement and the utter stillness of the air.  The squeaking of the chicks and the fluttering of the plover against the ground.  And the audible “pop” of the car tire hitting one of the chicks dead-on, killing it instantly.

I was nearly sick, right there at the side of the road.  Sick at the sudden random ending of a life.  Sick that it was, to a great extent, my fault.  That my presence, my curious persistence, had precipitated a death, however small.  Obviously I didn’t mean for it to happen, didn’t pursue any deliberate attempt at destruction.  But somehow intent does not completely wash away guilt.  Unintended consequences are still consequences, and when someone else has to bear the burden of my actions, when I cause pain or suffering by my acts, I cannot justify away the feeling in the pit of my stomach of deep, churning, remorse.  Those things stay with me in technicolor detail my entire life, more vividly than I can remember my college graduation, or my first kiss.

I think it is rarely the big moments in life that truly define us.  It is often those small private moments that happen when nobody is watching.  The ones that seem so insignificant at the time, but that playback in our heads years later with perfect clarity.  Moments that seem to have a pivotal impact on how we view ourselves, and could offer profound self-understanding if we can only grasp them and hold them.

Perhaps it is because we are not done with the lesson that they stay with us.  Perhaps they have something yet to tell us.

I don’t pretend to know why, but twenty years later I still hold that tiny body in my hand.

Last night Harry had his first attack of real fear.  We were watching, of all things, an episode of  ”Phineas and Ferb” – one of his all-time favorite shows, and at least tolerable for parental viewing – and suddenly he said “Mommy, turn this off.  I am scared. I don’t want to watch this anymore.”  He had his hands in his mouth and he was literally trembling.

The cartoon is not normally disturbing.  It is silly and a tad bit surreal, but never disturbing.  However, this particular episode was predicated on the main characters watching a late-night vintage movie of the cheesy low-budget “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” variety that involved aliens and heads in jars.  The character in the cartoon let it scare her.  And so did Harry.

That night he wanted to sleep with mommy and daddy and we aquiesced.  He lay in bed between us, wide-eyed, fingers in his mouth, directing us to “whisper, or the aliens will hear us.”  It became apparent that he had mixed together the evening show and the Berkeley Breathed tearjerker Mars Needs Moms when he turned to me and said “Mommy, I am tired and I want to go to sleep, but I need to stay awake and protect you from the aliens.”

(plink)

(That is the sound of a mother’s heartstrings pulled to breaking.)

I looked at his earnest little face, and dark, dark eyes, wide with anxiety.  ”Baby, go to sleep.  The aliens won’t get your mother.  Because she is too old and too tough and would NEVER EVER let an alien take her away from her little boy.  And the aliens don’t want me because I am way too mean anyway.”

And he sighed and he rolled over and dropped instantly into slumber.

I lay awake with my fears, those adult fears that are not as easily dismissed.  The fears when you find you are a grown up, and there is no big bed to climb into, and the problems are so much more complex than an alien that can be combatted by a baseball-bat swinging parent.  Selfishly, I missed the days when my worst fears came from the Twilight Zone. And I immediately thanked God that my son lived a life where the most frightening thing he has dealt with was a scary cartoon on the television.  I thought about the days ahead when his fears would not be so easily dismissed, of the things I could not shield him from, of the pains I could not take away.

It is so tempting, the feeling that I can take away his fears.  That everything can be okay when Mommy is nearby.   That a word can soothe and reassure.  But my mind roves ahead to other, unknowable, times and I feel so very small.  And just a little bit afraid.

I will update you on my current, and lately not unexpected, bout of silence, when my brain has stopped imploding. The short of it is that there really ARE businesses in this world whose business model is to exploit the bid protest system, saturating it with protests of no particular merit, in order to delay contracted work enough to drive their competitors out of business and essentially extort the government by being an utter pain in the ass. People are hurt. Real people who love their jobs, are good at them, and work very hard. Competent people who deserve the business. Your tax dollars are wasted instead of producing work that is in the public interest. And it’s 100% legal.

But please NEVER confuse legality with ethics.

I do not work on a government contract. But I am scrambling to find meaningful work for those that do, so that they don’t lose their jobs, their houses, and the health insurance their families rely on.

I have to do this because it is simply the right and decent thing to do.

What I really want, REALLY want right now, is a ocean with lots of white beach, a shade umbrella, an audiobook, some knitting and a cute cabana boy to bring me copious nerve-numbing quantities of rum punch until I can’t decently knit anymore. And then I want to put my toes in the sand in happy oblivion.

And shame, SHAME on you people that twist and abuse systems designed to ensure fairness until they become tools to propagate unfairness.

I don’t know how you sleep at night. I truly don’t.

Except when it isn’t.

My husband and I are not huge football fans. I will admit to being an NCAA loyalist. I cheer for my alma maters. I am a dedicated Razorbacks fan, until the few occasions where they play Missouri. Then I am a Mizzou Tigers fan, through and through. Except, of course, in basketball. Then it is the Hogs all the way to the core. Well, and then there’s baseball, in which case it’s professional minor league; my teeth were cut on Rochester Red Wings programs, and as an Upstater, baseball is in my soul. The Southern football permeation never really stuck.

What can I say? My sports loyalties are complicated.

But at the very moment that New Orleans defeated Minnesota in the NFC championships, my husband and I looked at each other and knew we were going to New Orleans to watch the Super Bowl.

Yes. I know the Super Bowl was in Miami. But if you are a New Orleans fan, then NOLA is where the real party is. Nobody throws a party like the Big Easy. Nobody.

This Super Bowl was not necessarily about being a Saints fan (although I will express a deep admiration for Drew Brees).  It’s not even about being a football fan.  It was about being a New Orleans fan.  It was about coming back.  It was about grasping a tiny little bit of redemption.

This has been beaten to death in the media, I know.  But I can tell you from the heart, that all the hype in this case is completely true.  It really was that important.  And I wanted to be home to watch it.

We made the long drive down late into the night and arrived in time to take my son to his first real Mardis Gras parades.  The first parade confused him, but by the second, he was climbing up on the barriers like a native, shouting to the Krewes to “Throw me something, Mister!”.  He ate his weight in King Cake.  He danced to the high school bands.  We took in into the Quarter for beignets and he bought trinkets in the French Market.  For the first time since Katrina, we had returned to New Orleans in happiness and celebration.

There were moments of sadness.  We struck up a conversation with a woman in a shop on Decatur, and inevitably ended up comparing Katrina notes, even now, four years later.  She was from the Lower Ninth, with all the horrible implications of loss that entailed, and I immediately felt that drenching sense of guilt at having abandoned the city.  I told her we were permanently displaced in Arkansas and she nodded.  She looked at me and said “Honey, be glad you got out.  It’s been hard here.  Real hard.  Raise that baby outta here.”  I had tears in my eyes and she smiled.  There was that understanding that those that left and those that remained, we all lost.  There was no shame in our choices and it was not the day for grief.  It was the day to raise our voices to the blue, blue sky and cheer.

We watched the big game in a house packed with ex-pats, flying down from as far away as Minnesota.   We all cried when the National Anthem was played.  People who couldn’t come down called in at every big play.  At the game-clinching interception, we screamed ourselves hoarse.  And when the Saints won, we stared at each other in disbelief for a few seconds and then poured out of our houses to dance on the streets with the neighbors, car stereos blaring, fireworks lighting the night sky and the frost of our breath in the air.  It was beautiful and it was wonderful and we were again in our city.  Back in a city that defied every dire prediction to rebuild.   Back where there were still ruined houses in the streets and blocks of no-man’s wastelands.  But at that moment none of that mattered.  We were all together and the bands were playing, and there was King Cake on the table.

The Saints went to Miami, and they brought us all back home.

I hate driving.  If my town had any reasonable kind of reliable mass transit, I would give it up in a heartbeat.  When I take my bi-monthly trips to Washington DC, I do not rent a car and I happily take the Metro and buses everywhere.

This does not mean, however, that I can’t drive.  In fact, it is a skill that I consider myself, with a certain level of self-conceit, to be pretty damned good at.  My father, who occasionally reads this blog, may consider this to be hereditary, but I think it has more to do with not being able to date a boy that I share a town with.  I have logged a lot of hours in a car, under a lot of inclement conditions.  I have (with the exception of Baton Rouge, my cartographical Achilles heel), an excellent sense of direction.  I rarely get lost, and I never lose control.

It was a good skill to have this past weekend.   Arkansas was subjected to one of its occasional freak ice storms, and lacking any extensive road-clearing infrastructure, I was forced to travel over icy roads the twenty miles to my office to meet a promised deadline.  It was slick, but at a reasonable, steady pace, it was hardly insurmountable.

The key to driving on ice is to avoid acceleration, keeping in mind that acceleration is a change in velocity over time.  And velocity has both a speed and a direction component.   In practical driving terms, this means, just don’t change your speed or direction very quickly;  keep it all slow and steady.  Stay in your comfort zone.  Don’t overestimate your safe speed.

In application, however, the laws of physics runs smack up against the law of diminishing returns.

Translating,  if your individual speed of comfort on the ice is FIVE MILES AN HOUR, it is better for your personal safety (and for that of the rest of driving humanity) to please, please, please, JUST STAY HOME.

Five miles an hour does not provide enough momentum to navigate any kind of incline whatsoever.  Which requires acceleration.  Which violates the best practice of avoiding changes in speed or direction.  The net result of which is having your vehicle simultaneously spinning it’s wheels and sliding backward with ME (who is behind you, driving a prudent speed sufficient to take me up the less than 5 degree incline) frantically making maneuvers to avoid hitting YOU, while simultaneously trying to avoid quick changes in either speed or direction.

Do you see the inherent conflicting mandates here?

I completely appreciate that you are not overestimating your own ability to control a car at imprudent speeds.  I applaud you for that.  But, when I can get out of my vehicle and walk around in front of your moving car and reach a stop sign two blocks away before you do, I truly question the necessity of using a vehicle at all.  Walking would be faster, and have the added side benefit of removing a one-ton, sliding, careening, road hazard for those of us with a higher margin of safety and experience.  Just think of it as another law;  the law of common sense.

Isn’t it nice when so many laws come together at one point so logically?

And really?  Who wouldn’t just rather be at home on a cold day?