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Survived, and thrived!

Posted on January 15, 2013 | 10 comments

Last week at this time, I was anxiously awaiting the return of my daughter from her survival weekend. Shortly after I posted Survival, I hope, the phone rang.

“You’re alive!” I exclaimed.

“Where are you?” she replied, as if she’d never been gone.

I hopped into my car and raced down to the high school to retrieve her. I got out to hug her, but I kept it brief; there’s no shower in a debris hut. Despite the fact that I was busting with curiosity, we agreed to wait until her father got home for the full debriefing. I did ask a couple of baseline questions like, are you alright and did you have fun, but I was content to wait for the details.

It turned out, not much actually happened during the trip, but as we all know from Seinfeld, a show about nothing, it doesn’t take much to make a great story and my daughter is quite the raconteur.  There was the bit about crawling into her sleeping bag with all her clothes on, including a pair of mittens, only to discover that she couldn’t use the zipper with mittens on, and she couldn’t get the mittens on once she was in the sleeping bag. Happily the sleeping bag was warm and mittens were not necessary.

hannah at survival 2013

She told us how wonderful it was to fall asleep while looking up at the trees and the sky, only to realize when she opened her eyes that she hadn’t actually been asleep. Without a watch, it was impossible to tell what time it was or how long it took to do anything. With or without sleep, she loved her nights in the woods.

She came home the self-proclaimed “queen of peeing-in-the-woods” and an expert snow mason (two unrelated, newly-acquired, skills).

There was also a touch of pathos; the first full day was a bust when it came to building a fire. Her spirits were dampened, but she rallied and the next day she not only built and maintained her fire, but she was able to boil water and cook macaroni and cheese. Then she sat by the fire and ate while reading Walden. She brought home the leftover mac and cheese, in the pot, and told us that she intended to put it in the freezer and eat it again on the anniversary of her adventure, the way one might a slice of wedding cake.

The only human contact the kids were allowed was with the support crew when they made their daily visits at daybreak and dusk. She chose to do her trip solo which meant that as long as she posted a note each morning and evening that said she was fine they wouldn’t intrude. However, the outing took place in a state forest, open to the public in Townsend, MA, and every once in a while she saw someone walking through the woods who was not associated with the base camp. They would wave, or look at her quizzically, but fortunately no one stopped to ask what she was doing out there on her own. Even the man she thought she recognized who went by with a baby on his back, and later found out was, indeed, another gym teacher from the high school!

So all in all, it was a wildly successful trip. I can’t begin to tell you how proud we are of her. The only tiny problem is that she might have come home a bit spoiled. When we said goodnight that first night home, she complained that her bed was too cold!

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Survival, I hope

Posted on January 8, 2013 | 18 comments

This quarter, instead of playing volleyball or vaulting over the pommel horse in gym, my daughter learned how to build a bivy sack and a debris hut to attach it to. She also learned how to start a fire by directing sparks onto a shredded cotton ball seasoned with magnesium bits. The survival course is an alternative to the traditional gym class at Arlington High. The course ends with a four-day, three-night, solo outing in a state forest. The kids are given six “strike anywhere” matches and a ten by ten tarp. The list of things they are responsible for bringing include a roll of string, a knife, a flint, a metal trowel, a pot, a few cotton balls, and yes, a roll of toilet paper.

The school provides a few other key things as well; a sleeping bag rated for some ridiculously cold temperature, a pair of army surplus boots that are guaranteed to keep their feet warm (unless they wear too many socks or tie them too tight), and enough food to keep them from starving, to wit; a block of cheese, a stick of pepperoni, a couple of bagels, some oatmeal, and a package of mac and cheese. Can’t start your fire to heat water? Kids have been known to chomp on uncooked pasta.

The teacher of this class, Bob Tremblay, told a room of concerned parents that Arlington High has been offering this course for forty years and he’s been leading it for nine. Bob looks like my idea of an outdoor guy, with shoulder-length hair and a full, grey beard. Given the variety of kids going on this trip, it may be time for me to reassess what an “outdoor” person looks like, but I can tell you what they don’t look like – me.

When Hannah first said she wanted to do this, I said, “Are you out of your freaking mind?” My response probably caused her to rocket straight from interested to determined. If I had shrugged and said, “Whatever,” maybe she’d be home with us now, warm and well-fed. But shocked as I was, I was also inordinately proud, even though this was clear proof that kids are hard-wired for things parents can’t take responsibility for, good or bad.

We spent the weekend in Vermont before her trip so she could practice building fires and huts. As you can see, she seemed to get the hang of it. On the official outing, the kids are separated from each other. Each one is given roughly two acres of their own and confined to their area for the duration. If you sneak off to meet a friend and they catch you, you fail the course. One of the things Bob likes about those heavy army boots is that they slow the kids down, make it hard for them to cover too much ground.

debris hut

By the time you read this, she will have been returned home, hopefully safe and sound. Strangely, I was relatively relaxed while she was gone. I did worry briefly each night that she’d be bored and cold, and during the day I was grateful that it wasn’t unbearably cold. Now, though, as her return becomes imminent, I am getting more anxious. Maybe that’s because I’m finally allowing myself to think about her, rather than actively working to distract myself.

No matter the reason, I’m sure that when I see her and express my joy and relief at having her back, she’ll respond with her usual aplomb, “What? It was no big deal.” But we know the truth. It was a very big deal.

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Cooking is for the birds

Posted on January 1, 2013 | 6 comments

Did you read my last post about cooking my first turkey? The sub-text, which I skipped over when I realized how much I had to say about the turkey experience itself, is that I don’t like to cook. I blame my mother.

I love my mom. I think she did a great job, considering what she had to work with. When friends talk about how lacking their own mothers are, I offer to lend them mine so they can get whatever it is they didn’t get from theirs. I feel very lucky in the mom department. But when it came to cooking, she fell down on the job. Mind you, we weren’t starving. She knew how to cook and she did feed us, but from my perspective she wasn’t enjoying it. (She may, of course, have a different take on the subject and she’s welcome to comment if she feels the need.) Having observed that cooking was a thankless task, I had no compelling desire to learn how to do it. Then I met Andrew.

On our third date, he made dinner for me at his apartment. I remember sitting in his kitchen in Somerville, drinking the wine I’d brought and eating the goat cheese he’d put out for me to munch on while he bustled about. The meal started with tomato soup, and he served roasted tomatoes with the entrée. I don’t like tomatoes, but I was impressed with his culinary skills. I congratulated myself on having found a man who was not only handsome, smart, and funny, but could cook. When he found out that I was a take-out kind of gal, he was disappointed. I decided to step up my cooking.

Then I met my future mother-in-law and I began to feel like I was living inside a bad joke with the punch line, “not as good as his mother makes it.” My MIL is an outstanding cook. I was intrigued, and a little annoyed. Particularly because, after committing to the long-term relationship, I discovered that Andrew didn’t actually do much cooking. He had cleverly dangled the possibility that he would cook as bait and I had swallowed the hook.

During our double-income-no-kid years, cooking never posed much of a problem. Between Andrew’s penchant for pizza and my love of Chinese food we could go for weeks without turning on the oven. Then we had Hannah and we had to confront the subject all over again. Although Andrew argued that pizza provided a balanced meal, Hannah never developed a taste for it, and before she had teeth who could blame her?

I managed to perfect half a dozen suitable dinners and before long my loving daughter learned to say, “That again?” When I picked her up after school, she would ask what we were having for dinner and then express her dismay. I started sticking my fingers in my ears when I saw her coming. While my repertoire has increased, and Hannah’s taste buds (and manners) have developed, dinner remains somewhat problematical at our house and frankly, I don’t expect it will ever get any better. I just don’t enjoy cooking.

If after reading this you’re feeling bad for my mom, don’t. One day Hannah will write about what an abysmal model she had for cooking and my mom will have the last laugh.

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Brisket for Thanksgiving?

Posted on December 24, 2012 | 5 comments

For several years, my sister and I have been alternating hosting duties for our major holidays; Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Thanksgiving, etc. The first year that I hosted Rosh Hashanah, my mom brought the cooked brisket to my house. I pretty much just set the table. The next year she brought the brisket, raw, and we prepared it together. We sat on my front porch and schmoozed away the hours it took to cook. Then came the year I was ready to solo. It was a success, with a brisket as good as Mom’s, if I do say so myself.

Through my years of brisket-training, I was able to avoid the Thanksgiving turkey—until this year, when it was my turn to host Thanksgiving. Knowing how much I did not want to make a turkey, my mother suggested she would cook it and bring it over. There was a precedent, the brisket, so without giving it any thought, I accepted. However, upon reflection, I realized that a turkey was not a brisket, and I had trouble envisioning how Mom would successfully transport the bird. A brisket, after all, is a flat slab of meat, easy to carry in a pan with a lid, a turkey, not so much.

My mother then suggested she would come to my house and we’d prepare the bird together. Since that had worked so well with the brisket, I acquiesced. But the evening before Thanksgiving I remembered my mother’s fatal flaw: She is not a morning person. I thought that asking her to get up early to come over and walk me through the preparation would be selfish. I told her I could manage on my own, if she told me what to do.

So the night before Thanksgiving, my mother gave me a turkey tutorial over the phone. I made notes, many of which I was, unfortunately, unable to decipher. A few elements were legible; brown (which I knew was for brown paper bag), backwards (which I think was how the bird was to go into the bag, unless it wasn’t), and figure eight (which had something to do with the string I never used).

With Andrew’s help I got the bird into the paper bag, but he was skeptical. He said people sometimes tented a bag over the turkey, but he’d never heard of encasing the bird in the bag. “How are you supposed to baste it?” he asked.

Baste it?

We got the bird tucked into the oven, and when I was reasonably certain my mother would be awake I called her. It turns out you don’t baste it. That’s the whole point of the paper bag.

I’m not a big fan of turkey, but this one was delicious. It could be because it was a ridiculously expensive bird, fresh and brined, sourced from a local farm stand because I didn’t know any better. Or it could be that turkeys are insanely simple to make. Whatever the reason was for my success, I conquered another holiday meal, and made my mother proud. And for that I am truly grateful.

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How can good grades be bad?

Posted on December 17, 2012 | 11 comments

When it comes to grades, sometimes it’s harder to parent a child who consistently gets good grades than a child who under-achieves. Let’s hop into the way-back machine so I can explain using my own experience as a mediocre student as an example.

I regularly brought home disappointing grades. My mother would say things like, “You’re not working hard enough,” or, “Perhaps you should spend less time watching television and more time studying.” My mother knew the basic message she had to deliver to me; work harder, or else.

My older sister, on the other hand, was an earnest, hard-working student. And the oldest, I think we can agree, is traditionally burdened with higher expectations than the middle child (me). On the oh-so-rare occasion that she brought home a disappointing grade she would be devastated, and my mom would soothe her and say, “Oh honey, it’s only a C. It doesn’t matter.”

My own daughter, my only daughter, is cursed with the high performance expectations of the oldest child, exacerbated by the unwanted attention that an only gets. Much to her dismay, we expect her to get good grades. On the rare occasion that she brings home a disappointing grade, we are, well, disappointed. Had I not been trotting along behind my older sister, sprinkling bad grades behind her, my mother might not have had the perspective to say to her first-born, “There, there. It doesn’t matter.”

My child is plagued by one other difference; she doesn’t appear to work terribly hard to get her good grades. I say “appear,” because on this point our realities differ. How do you tell a child that gets excellent grades that they should work harder?

A recent New Yorker had a piece about the value, or lack thereof, of homework. They claimed that studies show that doing homework, or not, doesn’t have much of an impact on grades. If that’s true, then maybe my daughter doesn’t need to work harder. But while homework may sometimes include the directive to study, studying should not be restricted to homework assignments.

The fact that we expect our daughter to perform well in school doesn’t have any impact on how we feel when she does. But like the Gary Larson cartoon where the dog only hears “Blah, blah, blah, Ginger,” all our daughter hears is criticism. When report cards came out for the first time this school year, my husband and I went to great lengths to let our daughter know how proud we were. We’re learning, slowly but surely, that even if expectations align with reality, we should take nothing for granted. Even so, I doubt my daughter will ever hear me say, “It’s only a C. It doesn’t matter,” not, anyway, until I hear it from my mom.

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There’s got to be a pony somewhere

Posted on December 4, 2012 | 33 comments

There’s an old joke that goes like this:

Worried that their son was too optimistic, the parents of a little boy took him to a psychiatrist. In an attempt to dampen the boy’s spirits, the psychiatrist showed him into a room piled high with nothing but horse manure. Instead of displaying distaste, the little boy clambered to the top of the pile and began digging.

“What are you doing?” the psychiatrist asked.

“With all this manure,” the little boy replied, beaming, “there must be a pony in here somewhere.”

(Stolen shamelessly from some random web site with the assumption that retelling a joke is as fair use as it gets.)

I had to Google the joke itself because I couldn’t remember the setup, but the punch line has been a favorite of mine for years, although when I say it I use shit instead of manure. Maybe that’s because I didn’t remember that a little boy said it, or maybe because it just sounds better that way.

In any case, my husband and I were out with friends the other night. One of the guys said something that prompted me to remark, “There’s got to be a pony there somewhere.”

He laughed appreciatively, but his wife cocked her head and looked at me as if to say, “Huh?”

A third friend said, “What are you talking about?”

I said, “The joke. With all that shit, there has to be a pony somewhere.”

She shook her head. “Nope. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I turned to her husband. He shrugged. Horrified, I said to the first guy, “Well you know the joke don’t you? You laughed!”

“Never heard it,” he said.

“Then why did you laugh?”

“I figured you were trying to make me feel better by saying something about a cute little horse.

How could it be that I was the only one who knew that joke? We’re all within a few years of each other, age-wise, so it’s not like there was a generation gap. Even my husband claimed he hadn’t heard it, and I guarantee I’ve said it in front of him before. (That, however, may be a case of the selective hearing practiced by all happily married couples.)

He did point out that I have been known to say to him, in exasperation, “Why aren’t you two ponies?” which is what Charlie Brown said to Snoopy when he was trying to figure out how to ask out the little red-haired girl. They didn’t know that reference either.

snoopy

Up until now I’ve accepted as a universal truth that at some point in their lives all children ask, “Can I have a pony? It can live under my bed.” But maybe that was just me. Maybe I have an unhealthy pony obsession. Come on friends, saddle up and weigh in on this.

If I said to you, “With all this shit, there has to be a pony somewhere,” would you know what I was talking about? Inquiring minds want to know.

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Hope I Don’t Die Before I Get Old

Posted on November 27, 2012 | 2 comments

I just finished reading Hope I Don’t Die Before I Get Old, a collaboration between two friends, Mary Boone Wellington and Tracey Bowman, who are the primary caregivers for their elderly parents. They share their stories in alternating chapters and include useful information on all kinds of things you might not know you need to know about, like common medical problems of the elderly, Long Term health insurance, how to clear clutter and more.

There are probably a bunch of books like this on the market, and as baby boomers age there will be more. The appeal here is the conversational style; it’s like listening to friends tell stories over coffee at Panera’s, only with more candor. If you approach the book with that expectation you can excuse the occasional typo and abundance of exclamation points. It is, after all, self-published, but don’t let that stop you. When I met co-author Mary, she observed that it was “…pretty well written considering the fact that I’m a visual artist.” That honesty is a big part of the book’s charm.

Both Mary and Tracey struggled in their roles as caregivers. They were, occasionally, resentful of the time and effort it took, and the sense that their elders were not as cooperative or appreciative as they should have been. That may sound shocking, but I’m guessing it’s not unusual. I’ll bet every child of an elderly parent has had similar thoughts, and then been horrified and guilt-ridden. However, Hope I Don’t Die Before I Get Old posits that the negative feelings may actually make you a more effective caregiver (which may be why the sub-title is How to Survive Old Age: Your Own or Someone You Love) if you pay attention to what those thoughts are really telling you.

After expending effort to make her mother’s house safer and enduring a scolding in response, Mary was hurt, even as she realized that her mother “…longed to be on her own again…without me asking her how she felt, or what she wanted for lunch, or whether she wanted a nightlight in the kitchen.” Her frustration caused her to vent to her friend, Tracey, who helped her understand that “…this process was a kind of orphaning, and my anger was transparent cover for my sadness and fear.”

Who wouldn’t be scared by the prospect of becoming an orphan? That primal fear may be what drives children to worry about their parents long before their parents are inclined to worry about themselves. There may come a day when you have to intervene and take away the car keys, but what if your elder decides on their own that they no longer feel safe behind the wheel? Aging isn’t easy and elders need to be able to maintain some control over their lives.

Reading Hope I Don’t Die Before I Get Old will undoubtedly make you think about your own aging as well as that of your elders. Everyone is different and YMMV, but buying the book is a small investment to make in the future that, if you’re lucky, is still a long way away.

You can buy a copy of Hope I Don’t Die Before I Get Old here.

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Elderly suitor

Posted on November 20, 2012 | 6 comments

My eighty-six year old neighbor has a crush on me. I’m going to call him John, because I don’t know his name. John is Greek and his English is minimal, so conversations are painful and time-consuming. I try to stick to weather observations like “beautiful day” and “it’s getting chilly,” but he persists in our version of chatting, so over time I’ve learned a thing or two about him.

He lives down the block with his wife and a cat (or two, or three). He has a daughter in Connecticut who is, apparently, a great success, and lives in a house I think he bought her, with his grand-daughter. Another daughter passed away a couple of years ago. I think the cats were hers. Most days, he takes a walk up and down our street. His wife does not join him, but sometimes one of his cats does. He carries a very tall stick as a cane, and moves slowly.

If I am outside when he passes by, he stops to say hello. If I am actively engaged in something, he will stand on the street and watch me. After a while, if I don’t stop what I’m doing to join him at the curb, he’ll walk onto the lawn towards me. He does this even if I’m mowing the lawn. When that happens, I feel obliged to stop the mower to say hello since clearly he is going to pursue me until I do, even though it strikes me as an outrageous intrusion.

He kisses me hello on the cheek. The first time he did that, I allowed it out of some convoluted sense of respect for his age; that and I didn’t know how to repel him politely. Lately, he has professed his love for me. I want to believe he means like the love he feels for a daughter, but given his limited English, I am not sure, particularly since one of his words is “jealous.” He told me he was jealous of my husband. If he is like most other elderly men, he is probably just taking advantage of his advanced age to get away with saying mildly inappropriate things. But I am no longer comfortable letting him kiss me, and I don’t know how to make him stop.

I have taken to avoiding John when I can. If I’m thinking of going out, but I see him on the street, I wait until he’s gone. Recently, I ran away from him. I was across the street, chatting with another neighbor, an older woman he likes to hug hello, when he came by. We said hello and then I told him we had something to do and dragged her back to my house, up the driveway and around the back. We congratulated ourselves on getting away and continued our conversation. After a few minutes, I walked back to the driveway – where he was still standing, waiting for my return.

Winter is my least favorite season; I hate the cold. This year, however, I’m looking forward to it, because it will curtail my elderly suitor’s constitutionals. If John’s intentions are innocent, I can tolerate them for the sake of an old man’s happiness. If, however, they are not, I do not want to encourage him. Since I don’t know how to discern his true motives, I guess I’ll spend my winter reprieve dreaming up creative ways to avoid him come spring. 

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Virtual shopping has limits

Posted on November 13, 2012 | 2 comments

The electronic thermostat in the family room needs to be replaced. My first impulse was to buy locally, but we had a coupon for $25 off a seven-day, programmable thermostat from Home Depot, and we assumed that they would have a bigger selection than our local hardware store, so off we went. The selection probably was bigger, but it was all from one manufacturer. We could get a Honeywell 1 week programmable unit, a 5-1-1 unit, a 5-2 unit, a 7-day unit, a wireless 7-day unit, a flush mount unit, an old-school, round, non-programmable thermostat, and all kinds of additional models that were variations of the above.

We narrowed it down to one choice and a quick check of Amazon via Andrew’s iPhone showed us that we could get it online for considerably less money, even with the coupon. In theory, I disapprove of people who go to a store to scope out an item and then buy it for less on Amazon, but sometimes the price difference can be compelling. The moral high ground can be slippery.

We also did not buy a ceiling fan/light/heater for our bathroom. Our current fan makes a god-awful sound, one that clearly indicates that something is wrong. Maybe all that’s wrong is that it is so damn loud, but we both remember quieter days and we’d like them back. The store only had a couple of choices and the list of features was short; noise factor and heat wattage. As a marketing professional, I was surprised to note that one model was touted as noisy. Was that a selling point? Did anyone come in looking for the noisy model? The other was ultra-silent. I thought silence was binary; it was, or it wasn’t. But the real sticking point for us was that while the noisy one would fit in the existing hole in the ceiling, we would need to enlarge it for the ultra-silent one. And by “we” I mean someone else. Clearly this was a problem best dealt with at a later date, so we wandered over to the Garden Center where Andrew can always find something to buy.

While he shopped, I read my Kindle. He was doing a final check of the gardening supplies in the cart when a little girl approached us, she was probably around ten, and said, “May I borrow your cell phone? I can’t find my father.” For some reason she directed her question to Andrew. Maybe she intuited that he had the cooler iPhone and that I was still using a Nokia flip phone with the Cingular logo on it.

He called up the phone screen and handed it to the girl. I asked, “Do you have your dad’s number memorized?” She said yes and proceeded to demonstrate.

Then she said into the phone, “I can’t find Dad.” I envisioned her talking to her mother in some other state and briefly wondered how she was going to get along with my own daughter when I ended up bringing her home. Luckily, her mom walked around the corner and they saw each other. The girl took a step away and then remembered she was holding the phone and came back. Then a quick “thank you” and she ran off to her mom.

That interaction made all the time spent not buying things worthwhile. If we had gone straight to Amazon, without the detour to Home Depot, we wouldn’t have been able to help reunite a little girl with her family. Unless that happens in an Amazon department I haven’t discovered yet.

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IRS – Kafkaesque

Posted on November 6, 2012 | 4 comments

It’s Election Day. By the time you read this, I will have voted. It’s possible that by the time you read this the fat lady will have sung and the election will be over; votes counted; streets swept clean of confetti. If you waited long enough, the recount lawyers may already have walked away, and the nation’s attention will be back on football. And that’s fine with me, because I don’t want to talk about politics. I want to talk about something that everyone can agree on; how painful it is to deal with the IRS.

After we filed our taxes last April, we got a letter from the IRS claiming that we owed them money. After a painstaking review we were able to figure out that we had made a mistake with an IRA. In layman’s terms, money went into one bucket that should have gone into another. We remedied the mistake and filed an amended return. The new return showed that the IRS owed us money. In the fullness of time, the IRS notified us that they had seen and accepted our amended return and that a refund would be sent to us, which was good to know since the check arrived the day before the letter!

We fast forward now to a day not so long ago, when the letter carrier rang our doorbell. Andrew got there first so he was signing when I said, “Oo, it’s so exciting to get a letter you need to sign for!” I was envisioning an offer of representation from a fancy New York agent, or better yet, a three book deal from the Random Penguin! I was vaguely aware that the letter carrier was apologizing for the delivery and I couldn’t understand why good news would upset her. Then Andrew handed me the letter, addressed to me, from the IRS.

The letter said I had thirty days to send them $353.03 or they would start garnishing my wages. My first thought was, not so smart are you IRS? I don’t have a job! My next thought was, hold on, we don’t owe the IRS money. And if we did, why was it addressed to me? It wasn’t hard to determine that the sum was the amount of my personal IRA (re-characterized for our amended return) plus $11.76 of “failure to pay” and $5.27 of interest. Now we get to the painful part.

I spent fifteen minutes on hold, only to find out that the woman who finally plucked me out of telephone limbo couldn’t help me. I was an advanced issue. I had a moment of panic when she said she was going to transfer me, envisioning the call being dropped and having to start again from scratch, but she got me successfully to the next person. And there the success ended. Sixty-two minutes later, most of it spent on hold with brief interruptions to assure me that she was still working on it or to confirm something I’d already told her, the verdict was in – she couldn’t help me over the phone.

The computer indicated that we, the married-filing-jointly-entity owed nothing to the IRS. The form that included the numbers that produced the $353.03 indicated that we owed no money. And yet, somehow, I owed money. She allowed as how it was highly irregular, and she may even have said I might be right, I didn’t owe anything, but I may have been hallucinating by then. But in any case, she would have to escalate the issue, off-line, and someone would get back to me in a month or so. I only hope it’s before they try to garnish my wages.

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