So who wants to be a princess in socks with pearls?

Me, me, me, me!

I just finished test-knitting this Tintagel sock for Janel Laidman for her upcoming book The Enchanted Sole.

Now I just have to figure out what to wear with them that won’t cover them up.

Okay, I may total wreck my carefully crafted image to some folks, but, here goes:

A SEPHORA just opened in Little Rock!!!

SQUEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

No.  I have not been blogging.  I have been being a Responsible Adult.

Is there somewhere that you can resign from Responsible Adulthood?

There should be.  

Because this?  Is sometimes not worth the privilege of the driver’s license and being above drinking age.

 

This weekend, in a field near Casa de Awareness:

“Mommy, here is a flower for you!  I picked this for you!”

“Thank you honey, that’s beautiful.  This flower is a clover flower.  l like clover flowers.  And so do bees – bees like clover.”

“Why do the bees like clover?”

“Well, because clover makes a sweet juice that the bees like to eat.  Bees eat the clover juice.”

“Mom.  You mean NECTAR.  Bees eat NECTAR.”

I stand corrected.

Now my son, let me explain to you the finer points of recessive inheritance…

Your feel-good-Friday music of the week, brought to you by My Level of Awareness is:

Whip up some Banana Pancakes and enjoy.

I feel safe in the twin assumptions that, first, my child does not yet know how to read, and second, that he does not know the address of my webpage.  I would like to make the assertion that he doesn’t know how to get on the internet, but the fact that he has mastered my iPhone would put that to the lie.  

So, I feel rather confident in sharing a secret.  My husband and I have altered our weekend plans to give Harry a surprise.  I managed to get my hands on tickets to Disney on Ice for half the ticket price.  Not only tickets, but FIFTH ROW tickets.  On the lower level.  

The time you have where they still believe in magic is so short.  It will not be long before skaters in foam character suits will cease to enthrall and will become simply people in poorly-ventilated costumes.  He is already showing signs that his age of enchantment will be fleeting.  I want him to have the magic while he can.

But I often wonder if I am being a bit disingenous, even with myself.  I am not so sure that it is my desire to give him these technicolor memories, as it is my own desire to relive that moment in time when life was simpler, and possiblities were so limitless.  It isn’t a startling revelation that we relive our childhoods vicariously through our children.  That is so patently obvious and accepted enough to be almost trite.

No, the surprise is not the desire itself, but the intensity of the pang of loss, and the compulsion, bordering on fanatic, to return to a single moment of fantastical awe without that willful, conscious, suspension of disbelief that we as adults must make to immerse ourselves in the beautiful fictions.

I have spent my life in the pursuit of the man behind the curtain, in pulling back the veil on the wonders of nature, and with few exceptions I have found that the view behind the surface to be even more wonderful, more complex, more inspiring, than the mystery.  As Hamlet says “There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy…”.  But isn’t that the gist of it?  That longing?  No matter how amazing the reality, we reach for that little bit more.  

I can’t say that I would trade that glimpse into the workings of the Universe to have remained a perpetual child, no matter how the complexity and the demands of my adult life create that longing.

But sometimes, the recipe for the serene soul is just a little but of unadulterated Mickey Mouse.

I am that thing that is much less rare than stereotypically assumed.

I am a New York country girl.

That enormous concentration of humanity known to us Upstaters simply as “The City” is the image of New York that overwhelming dominates the popular media.  It is hard for most people to wrap their head around the idea that most of the rest of New York is overwhelmingly comprised of villages and hamlets that are decidedly New England in character, and by large tracts of agricultural land.  That land is actively farmed or dormant, but in either case it is blissfully devoid of tract homes or condominums, and nary a yellow cab or street hot dog vendor to be found.

There was a family farm until my father’s generation, when it was sold due to the general lack of interest in his generation toward the often unrewarding labor of farming it.    The herd of resident dairy cows were sold off when I was a very small girl, and the land was converted to plant agriculture when the price of dairy made it unprofitable, and when my grandparents became old enough that the more seasonal demands of dirt farming were less onerous that the daily grind of dairy production.  The farm had ceased to be productive in any agricultural sense long before it was sold, and I spent the majority of my time in my older youth between the more recent suburban residences of my parents, but I felt a pang of sadness nevertheless when the farm passed out of the family.  My great-grandfather had paid for that land on shares.  Growing beans and wheat and dairy, he earned his farm through his labor.  And thus dispels another myth.  Yes, Virginia, there were Yankee sharecroppers.  It was not entirely a Southern phenomenon.

The great irony of my love life is that I, a New York farm girl, granddaughter of a sharecropper, married a Mississippi city boy.  Stereotypes busted all around.

But the cultural distance between us Upstate residents and the Gotham that dominates our outward face is profound.  There are children that grow up in the inner reaches of the City, that never see a tree that wasn’t planted, who see cows only as pictures on milk boxes, or as red slabs of beef wrapped in plastic and styrofoam.  The have an only rudimentary understanding of the connection between a chicken and an egg, and have never waded into a stream to catch tadpoles.  The East River isn’t conducive for a casual canoe ride or exploratory wading.  There are no safe backyards to play in, no barbeques (open fires are strictly prohibited in a huge portion of the five boroughs), no place to ride a bicycle out of the danger of traffic.

No open spaces.

No open air.

In short, there are none of the quiet summer pleasures that form the normality for children of the suburbs and the country.  It is something that even those denizens of smaller metropolises have a hard time comprehending.

Imagine having to board a bus for a thirty minute ride, just to find a place to spread a blanket on the grass and read in the sun.

I explain this, because without that context, it is difficult to explain what the Fresh Air Fund does.

It gives children of the concrete jungle a chance, often for the first time, to understand what it is to have the  space and the freedom to play in the open air.  To see nature that isn’t meticulously (or not so meticulously) maintained by a planning board.  To see a beach where you can actually play in the sand.  

To camp in a tent.

To experience a night without street noise.

To hear a bird sing.

To actually see stars in the night sky.

My father and stepmother hosted a Fresh Air child for several years while I was growing up.  It isn’t unusual to host the same child year after year – in fact, most get invited back by their host families.  This is why this is a cause that I understand, that I have experienced, and I can support.

If you live within the Fresh Air hosting area, consider hosting a Fresh Air child.  Give them that opportunity for two weeks of summer in the open air.

If you don’t, but you just have fond memories of country summers and camping trips – consider donating to Fresh Air to help send a child to one of their summer camps.  

Because every kid should get a chance to look up into the sky and see the Milky Way.   At least once.

Harry: Mommy, where is the clock?

Harried and Overtired Mom:  It’s right there, Honey.  Can you tell me what it says?

Harry:  It says it is past Harry’s bedtime.

Mom:  Yes.  Yes it does.

Who says my son can’t read a clock?

I do not put forth that I have gained a whole hell of a lot of wisdom over the years.  I have spent my fair share of time knocking my forehead against a variety of flat immovable surfaces beyond the point where any claim to productivity could be made.  But, if I have one piece of smarmy-but-true wisdom to pass on, it is this:

Do not ever undervalue your girlfriends.

I have spent my entire adult life in male-dominated professions and male-dominated company.  A good portion of my closest, most inimate friends have been male.  I participate in one of the most male-dominated and testosterone-charged sports around.  My standard answer to my male friends when asked for relationship advice is “Hell, I don’t understand women any more than you do…”

But I never could get through life without my girlfriends.  And I will tell you why.

1. Girlfriends instinctively know when you don’t want them to fix things.  When you are upset and venting to male friends, they inevitably feel compelled to try to fix the problem.   Sometimes even the quietest of men, when presented with a teary-eyed girl will respond with a veritable encyclopedia of well-intentioned and very sincere advice.  Or they will go out and kill something for you.  As flattering and heartwarming as that may be, sometimes, really, you don’t want advice or killing.  You just want an audience.  No man will sit there and in complete empathy say  “Oh, no!” and “Of course”, and “Oh, I would feel exactly the same!”, and “What a <insert derogatory of choice>!” at all the perfectly timed moments like a woman knows how to do.  And sometimes, really, that’s all we want or need.  Men need to be TOLD when it’s only the sympathetic ear we are looking for.  Women know this immediately and without explanation the minute they answer the phone call in the middle of the night.
2. Girlfriends can tell you if your butt really does look fat in that dress without having to navigate an emotional minefield.
3. Girlfriends have the innate ability to answer the middle-of-the-night phone call without saying things that are profoundly stupid or insensitive.   
4. Come to think of it, Girlfriends have the ability to actually wake up for the middle-of-the-night phone call.
5. Girlfriends publicly recognize value of the occasional therapeutic shopping trip.  Men know this too, they just don’t admit it.
6. Girlfriends know that we still love our men.  Even when we bitch.  Mightily.  And they can differentiate the mildly annoying from the dangerously intolerable.  And they will let us know when the line has been crossed.
7. Girlfriends know how to be enthusiastic about something you really love.  Even when they don’t.  This is an empathy that completely eludes most men.  When you wax enthusiastic about your latest passion, male eyes glaze over, and you know they are reviewing the previous evening’s ballgame or WoW session in their heads.

So, to Amy-Renee, and Bambi, and Charlotte, and Sheila, and Wendy, and my sisters, and all the Sarahs, and all my lovely bloggy Girlfriends reading this:

Thanks.  You are indispensible. 

I have been helping my husband’s teenage cousin prepare for the math section of her ACT college entrance exam.   I have a minor in mathematics that I rarely have the opportunity to use (outside of statistics), and I was pleasantly suprised to find that my middle-aged senility had not yet extended to my memory of high school math.  While times are very different from the late seventies and early eighties in which I spent my teens, at least trigonometry has remained blissfully constant.  It was perversely comforting.

What was disorienting to me was the sheer preparation involved for these tests.  I don’t think that this is so much a function of time, but social class.  My friend’s children begin taking their ACT’s in ninth or tenth grade for “practice”.  They buy books of practice tests and spend hours taking mock tests.  They seem so, well, “important”.

I grew up in a world of factory workers and ambulance drivers.  The post-secondary expectations of my parents were to marry and find gainful work as soon as possible.  The order of these things was relatively unimportant.  College was not something people like my parents even thought of.  Even for my generation, it was not a given.  I was told I could go to whatever college I was given a scholarship to – as long as parental funds were not involved, I was allowed total freedom of choice.  Woefully unprepared for the process of college applications and interviews and visits, I fumbled my way in the dark through the maze of requirements and essays and standardized tests.  State school or private?  ACT or SAT?  Home or away?  These were questions from a completely foreign language and culture than my parents lived in.

Some of my colleges of choice required the ACT, some the SAT, so I signed up for both.  To be taken on the same day.  Back to back.  Having grown up in the day of New York Regents Testing, it never occured to me that it was unnatural to take both standardized tests on a single weekend.   It is still a point of pride that, exhausted from a solid morning of SAT testing and with no lunch, I fell asleep halfway through the math section of the ACT, woke up with ten minutes to finish, raced through the remaining thirty questions like a complete maniac, and still managed to cop a perfect score.  

(Okay.  I realize that reads like a sound bite from “The Big Bang”.  BTW – that show?  My life.  Grad School.  1994-2000. I knew all those people, I swear.)

So out of complete ignorance, I turned out just fine (well, at least educationally).  I didn’t go to Ivy League schools, but that was largely by choice, because I simply didn’t think I could handle the cultural shift.  But in the end, I have three degrees and a minor, over 320 college hours from respectable public and private universities (I was indecisive, so sue me), a perfect GPA in grad school, and the right to put Dr. before my name if I am feeling pissy.  

And I am considering an MBA.

My point in the listing here isn’t conceit, but rather a question regarding the relationship between the effort we are putting into the preparation for the sake of preparation, and outcome.  I am trying to understand the link between expectation, exposure, and future.  It’s important to me now, not because I am a sociologist, but because I am a parent.  I live into the future now in a way I never did before.  

The discussion of how teaching toward testing has dominated the public school paradigm and how it is or isn’t royally screwing up our educational system is a topic for another day, and one I really don’t want to get into now, because I am not in either camp.  It’s not a simple problem with simple solutions.  Anyone who sells you a simple solution to complex societal issues is peddling opium in a bottle, I promise.

I am entirely selfish in my wondering.  I wonder what my son’s experience is going to be as the offspring of college educated parents.   How am I going to react, knowing what I know, with my background of experience? What will my expectations be?  What will his expectations be, with professional parents and ready access to a 529 (which hopefully will recover SOME of it’s value in the next 15 years)?  Will I be pushy?  Will I be passive?  Will I drive him crazy enough he picks a University as far away from home as the road will take him?  I cannot turn myself around and see his childhood world from his perspective – he comes from such a different one than I did.  

Sometimes I try to cross my eyes and squint as I look at my son, and try to see him 14 years from now.  I try to project his loves, his ambitions, his aversions from the toys he picks up and the songs he sings.  I try to figure out how I am going to best encourage him, enable him, to be the things he dreams of being.

Right now, he dreams of being a platypus.

Thank God I have another 14 years.