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?

If she is like me, she is still at work, and Daddy is tucking you in.

I love my job. Mostly.

But right now? I am feeling a bit tested.

While I am being peevish, I have another useful announcement. This for the people in the children’s clothing industry. So, here I go, up on the soap box:

<tap, tap, tap> Is this thing on?

Good.  Okay.

To the makers of little boys’ jeans:

Little boys need pockets.

While I would have thought that this would be self-evident to anyone that had more than two hours contact with little boys, I can tell you with absolute assurance that the idea of fake pockets on jeans is a complete non-starter.

Without pockets, it is impossible to follow the maternal directive to keep your hands in your pockets in public restrooms and other “less than clean places”.

Without pockets, where can a boy put his treasures for safe keeping? Where do the pennies, smooth rocks, flowers for mommy, and the occasional lost toad, take up residence?

Where do you put your hands on cold days when you have inevitably misplaced your mittens while climbing the monkey bars?

Where do you put your gum for safekeeping during lunch hour?

In case you are in doubt about this point – Little boys do NOT carry purses.

Considering the myriad of crucial reasons to which little boys are indebted to their pockets, sewing fake pockets onto boys jeans is just…plain…mean.

Little boys may not have the monetary clout of wads of cash in those little pockets.

But Mommies do.

And they don’t like fake pockets either.

To the husbands and children of the universe:

I apologize in advance if I shatter some long-cherished myths along the lines of the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, but I have an announcement to make:

Ahem.

No.  It is not fairies who pick up your dirty socks and underwear up off of the floor at night and deposit them in the dirty clothes hamper or that put the cleaned and folded laundry back into your dresser drawers and closets.  If you wish to know the identity of the being who performs these services, take the members of your household and subtract all the children, pets, husbands and/or daddies and look at the remainder. You do the math.

However, if you choose to cling to this personal fantasy, be aware that it is traditional to leave payment for house fairies in the form of shiny trinkets.

Preferably of the solid gold variety.

Thank you. That is all.

I came from a “clean your plate” family.  In my mother’s defense, I do not ever explicitly remember hearing her say “There are children in Africa who would be grateful for your food…”, but I know with utmost certainty that my grandmother did.  In any case the message “Thou shalt not waste food” came through loud and clear.  It pains me to throw food away.  I feel a deep pang of guilt upon coming upon leftovers or produce that have gone past the point of no return in my refrigerator.  My Tupperware gets a workout.  Waste is a sin.

I remember distinctly rolling my eyes and thinking (if not being brave enough to actually say) the classic child’s response:  “So, if the children in Africa WANT my lima beans, they can HAVE my lima beans.  Please just pack them up and send them.”  There is a lesson beyond “don’t waste” that was completely lost on me.  It is a message that has clicked only now that I have had “children in Africa” moments with my son.  It is only now that the well-worn words are coming out of my own mouth that I look back with a certain amount of shame on the lesson that I missed.

Accept providence with gratitude.  Be thankful for what you have.  Do not want when you are not wanting.

My son had a meltdown last evening over a coveted toy, a Batman sword with flashing lights and sound effects.  A very hard plastic sword whose safety in my son’s hands (to our household pets and possessions if not to himself) could not be guaranteed.  A sword that he emphatically Does. Not. Need.

When these sentiments were expressed to Harry, along with the request to put the toy back in its place on the store shelf, the desperate WANTING of youth overtook him.  Nothing but the possession of that sword was important, and when he couldn’t have it,  he was ready to trade in family and home with the need of it.  He screamed with defiance.

“I DON’T LOVE YOU ANYMORE!  I DON’T WANT YOU ANYMORE!  I WANT  A NEW MOMMY AND DADDY!  I WANT TO LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE!”

I stopped and turned to look at him.  Keeping my voice as level and calm as possible, I played the “children in Africa” card, and there was an internal wincing as I realized it.

“Harry.  Do you know what happened last week?”

That got his interest.  He paused.  “No.”

“Harry, last week, there was a big earthquake far away in a place called Haiti.  And lots of little boys and girls lost all their toys.  Not only did they lose all their toys, but many of them lost their homes, and their mommies and daddies.  Some of them even died.  Isn’t that very sad?”

“Yes.”

“Now when we get home, I want you to go straight to your room without any supper.  I want you to look around and think very hard and decide if you really want to lose all your toys and your room.  I want you to think very hard about whether you really want to lose your mommy and daddy and never see them again.  Because, Harry, sometimes that happens to little boys and girls.  And it isn’t very nice or respectful for you to behave this way when you have so much.”

I would love to say this ended the screaming instantly but it didn’t.  He did go straight to his room, where he continued to fuss for a time, before he declared he was done and wanted to make the appropriate apologies and have his dinner.

The sword has not been mentioned again.

I have no idea if he even has the beginning of an understanding of gratitude.  I don’t think it occurs to him for a moment how fortunate his life is, even among his peers.  But I do have an obligation to teach the lesson I missed, even at the expense of the “children in Haiti”.  If I gave away every possession I owned, I could not right all the unfairness in the world.    I can at least teach my privileged son to be thankful.   Generosity starts with gratitude and I hope the message leads him better than it did me.

When two women show up at a wedding wearing the same thing, it’s a crisis.

When two little boys show up at a wedding wearing the same thing – it’s adorable!