Archive for November, 2009

Thanksgiving Day comes, by statute, once a year; to the honest man it comes as frequently as the heart of gratitude will allow.

-Edward Sandford Martin

This year I have been struck by what seems to me to be an increase in the number of expressions of Thanksgiving.  Perhaps this is because I am a high-using member of Facebook, and am a follower of quite a few blogs where very public proclamations of gratitude are made.  At the risk of blaspheming my soul, my family, President Obama, and Hallmark, I’ve noticed that my emotions are not entirely in synch with American societal expectations of this week in November, in the year 2009.  If you haven’t already slammed your cursor on the back button, and stricken “return” or “enter”, which sent you back into your Amazon.com Christmas buying frenzy, then I salute you for wishing to explore the abomination that is my mind.

To put it simply, I’ve noticed that this week I’m lacking the overwhelming sense of emotion, that I’m the luckiest person in the world with wonderful kids, a gorgeous husband, and the greatest shade of mustard on the textured walls of my cozy tract home.  You know the kind I mean.  The type of emotion that floods your very being.  The type of emotion where your heart leaps, you could drop a few joyful tears, and you want to literally jump up and down.  While I do harbor a fairly constant appreciation of my life and the incredible people in it, I was feeling a little guilty at the focus of my passion this week:  yams, pecan pie, pumpkin pie, Simon and Garfunkel turkey rub, cat urine, and clutter control.  Yes, my heart was most centered on these tasks, and I found the greatest sense of gratitude in the Zen-feel of my clean kitchen, the beautiful pattern on my guest bedding, and the pride in knowing I bake my pie dough from scratch.  Was this the undoing of Martha Stewart?  Did she lock her husband and children in a dark, damp closet while she found true meaning in the ingredients of her mixing bowl?  Perhaps mashing pumpkin pulp herself, rather than using the canned variety, was a way to channel her evil, inhuman, and persnickety spirit?  What is next?  Trading stocks, insider tips, and losing the holiday prison door decorating contest?

No matter, I say.  I can’t really speak to the state of Martha’s soul, but for myself, I think there are signs of hope.  For one, I do feel the flood of emotion about the important ones and things in my life.  Unfortunately, it sometimes comes at inconvenient times.  How about an ordinary Monday afternoon in February, after my husband says just the right thing?  Or at 8:30 PM on a school night, when my child tells me a joke that sends me into hysterics?  Or on a mountainside, or in a grocery store or, perhaps, on my couch in the living room with a hot a cappuccino in hand?  And other places more private?  Above all, I feel true gratitude, when I least expect it.

Just because it’s Thanksgiving, and the relatives are here (the group of whom were nothing but delightful this year, by the way), the wine is pouring, the piano is being played, and the house is warmed by a pretty glow of candles, doesn’t mean I feel gratitude.  I may be having fun, but I’m not necessarily ready to get down of my knees to thank the Maker.  I just hope that my tardiness or earliness as it was or may be, doesn’t upset the universe.  My heart seems to beat on its own schedule, and I hope someone can forgive me for this.  Perhaps I’m the one that is to do it.

Nonetheless, holidays and the appropriate emotions have been scheduled.  Your birthday needs to be the best day of the year, and Christmas should be about gratitude and generosity, regardless of the fact that it is really about your Visa bill, which is kind of entertaining, actually.  You can’t have a bad Valentine’s Day, and God FORBID your Labor Day is mediocre.  All this planned joy is really quite inconvenient for our unpredictable souls.  And yet, I do believe it is beneficial, as ritual is important, however pushed, pulled or urged on it may be.  It has the power to usher in good thoughts, goodwill, and ultimately, good actions.  Perhaps the last two often occur in reverse order.  So, I’m thinking that for these rituals, I am thankful.  It only gets awkward, when Hallmark gets to involved, and we send aggressively iambic, obviously rhymed, saccharine-sweet metered sentiments to our loved ones that don’t always match exactly what we mean.

As one who likes to take action, regroup, and “create” my problems away, I have penned some very specific greetings for the unbearably honest card-giver.  Let me know if you like any, and I will create some pictures to go with them.

• It’s your 5^th Birthday! You are…(open card)…Ours.  Note:  The word “special” has been removed.

• To my Darling on Valentine’s Day: I wish you didn’t watch so much television.  Then I would be more inclined to put out.  I love you much of the time.

• Happy Thanksgiving! I’m freaking exhausted and totally resentful about my sub-prime mortgage woes.  My mom and dad think I’m lame, and my sister-in-law thinks she’s better than everyone else, which is annoying and even more untrue.  Hope the food tastes good, and I hate cousin Patricia’s Jell-o salad. If Uncle Bill brings cheap wine again, I’m going to send him home.  I hope my brother Jim shows up.  He makes me laugh, and never insults me like you do.

• Happy Mother’s Day to My Best Friend. You are an okay mom.  I guess.  I can’t believe you actually feed your kids McDonald’s.  They are going to be overweight like you are.  That’s okay, though, ‘cause I like being better looking than you.

• Merry Christmas To My Wife.  It’s our 3^rd Christmas together.  I really love being married to you, but I would be really happy if you actually did follow through on your exercise routine and lost some weight.  Also, the laundry has been a big problem.  I know you’re busy with the kids all day, but we can’t afford laundry service, and, well, I’m not sure I should have to do it after a 13-hour workday.  I would love your help.  What’s wrong with you, actually?  Bill’s wife is still totally hot, and they don’t have piles of clean laundry on their dirty sofa, which isn’t dirty.  Like ours is.  I do love you still, somewhat, but let’s step it up just a bit, okay?

Oh, I almost forgot.  To all of you:  I hope you had the happiest of Thanksgivings, filled with the warmth and comfort of family, friends, and skillfully flavored, dead, abused birds.

That’s right, our litter trained 6-month-old kitty is sowing her oats via her UT onto the throw blanket of our bed, my husband’s shirt on the floor, and to make her point abundantly clear, on the smiling appliquéd ballerina on my daughter’s quilted pillow.  This is particularly stressful for me since I love my carpeting more than just about anyone or anything, though so far she’s left it alone.

I don’t know what to do.  I’ll put the defiled duvet in the super-turbo, extra hot, ecologically murderous cycle, and before I get a chance to cover the comforter with it, the cat opens her urethral floodgate.  The duvet has been washed three separate times within a two days, and the washing machine is so occupied that our urine-free laundry doesn’t get done, and rests in piles waiting to be similarly defiled.  Perhaps the laundry secretly wishes for this fate and summons the cat, as only an inanimate object could, so it can finally take the glorious plunge into the washing machine.

Does the cat, like our dearly departed bird, hate us too?  She came to us trained.  Though she was a shelter cat.  Maybe the “allergy” that the shelter peddler (I mean worker) reported that the last family had, was a pathological aversion to the incessant release of cat urine all over their clothing and bedding.  I don’t need the conformation of an allergist to claim that diagnosis for myself, and I also have an equally diseased affection for that new carpet of mine.

So now the cat is safe in our large master bathroom, where she can yellow-up the bath mat and decoy clothing that I have left for her, as a test of her fitness to venture into our condo-at-large.  I hope we can correct this via a clean litter box, a trip to the vet, and /or keeping my two-year-old from crawling to her in the tiny space between the wall and armoire saying, “Ha, kittee!  Ha, kittee,” four hours a day.  I just can’t learn to love the urine-scented home, and I don’t even want to think of what the alternative would be.

So, fingers, eyes, toes and whiskers are crossed.  If you are a cat person, I beg you to leave me advice.

The greatest surprise to me as a parent of children at the HIGH PERFORMING MAGNET SCHOOL is the amount of pressure there is on me and my academic performance, as it will be channeled through the brains and pencils of my innocent 2^nd grader and kindergartener.  The magic ingredient, besides good teaching, in those high test scores that the school touts is…(wait for it)…(okay, on with it)…(ready)…THE PARENT.  I do not say this in a self-satisfied way.  I say it with extreme regret, anxiety, and sadness, as I must say goodbye to the minutes and hours of each day so that I can be enrolled in 2^nd grade and kindergarten along with my children, and drag them through the accelerated level of homework for which they are not quite developmentally ready.

For years parents and teachers and presidents of, say, the United States have been emphasizing the importance of parental involvement in education.  At my child’s school, it is a source of tremendous pride, but for me it seems time-consuming, unnecessary, and a bit embarrassing.  While test scores are a decent, though far from perfect indicator of student learning, our obsession with them of late has resulted in the free time of parents being offered up in exchange for flash cards, flash cards, and flash cards.  And flash cards.  I don’t feel like a parent or even a teacher, but a coach.  We “drill and kill” as my child’s kindergarten teacher calls it.  My kid cries, I yell, and we repeat the same routine over each day.  Next week, I’m getting a whistle, a clipboard, and I will scream in their ears until they vomit.  Then, I will wonder why my children prefer Sponge Bob to reading, even though I will have taught them that school is boring, parents are annoying, and that flash cards are the key to the advancement of all things.

What’s worse, is that I’m quite good at doing things imperfectly.  I forget to remind my kids to return their library books or I don’t check my daughter’s homework to see if it matches the directions that the teacher sent me on her blog, since most kindergartners (lazy, aimless little suckers that they are) can’t yet read.  I am, in fact, so inept that I told the teacher recently that I’m not a very good student and I apologize for any annoyance my family may cause her.  To really drive that point home, we show up late (only a few minutes) to school about once every two weeks.  We are clearly among the troublemakers.  Thankfully, my children are mostly polite and dress well.

Perhaps this is a bit of unconscious rebellion from the spoiling tactics of my kind mother who tirelessly danced circles around me, cheerfully chirping while picking up food wrappers, lost homework, and clean clothes with which I would litter her floor.  For some reason, when I was 19, we all wondered why I hadn’t learned to clean, organize, or get out of a chair with regularity.  After dropping out of college the first time, I literally had to learn how to care enough to work hard.  I had cultivated an unrealistic optimism from having enjoyed the trampoline of my mother’s love that cushioned my every childhood and adolescent fall.

My children, on the other hand, will see their mother lounging safely on the beach, scoffing at the riptide of over-involved parenting.  No, I never worry that this is the wrong choice.  If it is, I’ll just send them to my mother’s house.  In the meantime, my job is to avoid the teachers until my kids are off to community college.

My family’s attempt at giving my husband a son in our parakeet, Lance, ended in tragedy.  Yes, after one week of awkward, new adoption jitters, our little friend has entered the next dimension, hopefully with Jesus at his side.

My husband woke me up from a nap saying, “You better see the bird.  It looks likes he’s dying.” I was too afraid to move.  Yes, our avian friend had been very quiet all week, but I thought he just hated us.  My husband went back to the girls’ room (the girls who said in delight, “Oh look, he’s sleeping on the bottom of his cage!”), and confirmed that, in fact, he wasn’t sleeping, but was taking the eternal nap.  Poor Lance!

With startled numbness, we went over the possible scenarios causing his death:  Did the cat get him?  No, he was safe in his cage with no signs of injury.  Was it too cold for him?  No, our thermostat, which is just 10 feet from him, read between 72 and 74 degrees for the past week, and we cover his cage at night.  Did he have enough food?  Yes.  Fresh water?  Yes.

We called Petco, and my husband asked for the young manager with the eyebrow piercing, who skillfully caught our dear Lance in her net and unknowingly sent him home to (gulp) die with us.  She was unavailable, so my husband talked to another employee who said she was sorry, and that sometimes it happens that the green birds, which are more abundant and less preferred for adoption, remain longer in the company of their feathered friends, so they take the change poorly.  She’s saying that Lance died of a broken heart.  How sad!  While I doubt it is that simple, it still supports my suspicion that Lance thought we were stupid and uninteresting.  In any event, a third animal being has died in our presence in the span of just four weeks (see Dog Blog and Petco-habitation).

The girls sat very quietly with this knowledge.  It seemed that the repeat experiences with animal deaths were making emotional warriors out of them.  Then,Winnie, my 5-year-old, seemed about to break as she said that this was “just like,” when the dog and fish died.  In the interest of walking her through the appropriate stages of grief, I asked her how she felt about it.  She replied, “Sad.  (pause) Can I have a lollipop?”

The day went on without a lot of expressed emotion from any of us.  I wished so much that I had noticed his illness earlier.  Before my oldest went to bed, she did cry, a good, solid cry.  I held her and told her that I was sad, too.  I then asked my husband if I could see the bird that I was too scared to look at earlier.  He took me outside and unwrapped the tiny, fuzzy corpse, from his plastic, semi-recyclable Safeway coffin.  He was a beautiful bird, gorgeously hued, with a sweet, sleeping little face.  How, I wondered, was he still so pretty?  This reminded me of how Romeo talked at the sight of Juliet’s corpse (As you probably remember, she wasn’t actually dead, but anyway…):

Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,

Hath had no power upon thy beauty.

Shakespeare could have easily written that about our Lance.

After a few moments of our front porch viewing, I allowed my husband to return our former parakeet friend to his bag for his final burial in our garbage can.  Thankfully, it was garbage night.  I don’t really know why we don’t have the kind of pet cemetery that my brother and I made of the patch of dirt under the swing set at my parents’ house.  When someone decides to turn up that dirt someday, they will discover a wealth of raisin boxes stuffed with Kleenex and fish bones.  Perhaps we are disposing of the animals in a way that is not respectful or does not align with how we feel about their passing, or even more important, the way our children feel about their passing.

When I returned inside, I remembered the days-old thawed ground beef that we failed to use, and I called to my husband back to put it in the trash.  He took it from me, and left the house double-fisted, a dead bird in one hand, and an unrecognizable dead cow in the other.  I found some bizarre comfort in the fact that the remains of the two would be together in the stinky mausoleum of our garbage can.

Then it struck me.  Our bonding aside, is the loss of our parakeet any more tragic than a dish of filet mignon or chicken cacciatore?  It’s interesting how our sense of morality changes based on our experiences and, above all, our feelings.

I still feel Lance’s absence.  The empty cage is not the same one that sat in our attic for years, its former bird spirits having left it.  Now it sits under the umbrella of our fenced in patio, and it is very clearly Lance’s former home with its scratched cuttlebone, seed shells, and little birdie droppings.  Lance’s presence, though silent, still speaks.  Or chirps.  Our family, once again, gets another lesson in the mystery of being and not being.

I wanted to provide a link to Martha Stewart, as this is her recipe, but it is no longer in the archives.  So I will credit her empire for the ingredients, but I will credit myself for simplifying it so that, hopefully, you will want to make it.  Please visit her website and buy something, if you feel bad for her.  I don’t make any commission on her sales.  Now if you buy a cat toy from Petco, I make commission, but I digress.

• Before beginning, you need to know that this is positively the best way to make turkey.

• First, you need to roast a whole clove of GARLIC, by drizzling it with OLIVE OIL, covering it loosely in foil, and sticking it in a 350° oven for an hour.  And, to quote Martha, “Remove from oven; let cool.”  (She’s so bossy.)

• In a bowl, combine a Scarborough Fair of the following fresh, chopped herbs (a handful of each):  PARSLEY, SAGE, ROSEMARY, and THYME.  Seriously.  Is that how Martha jokes, through ingredients?

• Add two sticks of UNSALTED BUTTER (softened), and a few teaspoons of KOSHER or ROCK SALT.

• Slice off the tip of the now roasted and cooled GARLIC, and squeeze the extraordinary clovepaste into the bowl.

• Mix all this together with your hands.  It will be messy.  If you are brave, invite a child to help, and they will adore you for letting them get gooey.

• Put the turkey in roasting pan with a ½ cup of water.  (Sorry for making you measure.)

• Now rub this all over the turkey:  on the outside, under the skin (separate it from the breast at both ends), and inside the cavity.  Stick some sprigs under its wings and sing You Are the Sprig Beneath My Wings. Don’t sing this if you hate that song, as it will be in your head all day.  If it does gets stuck in your head, play some Michael Bublé and you will be charmed and cleansed at the same time.  (Hey, I need an ad for him.)

• Cook your turkey as you normally would.  Google that or consult Julia or Joy of Cooking for times and techniques.  Just make sure your bird gets to pose on his front, back, and side, and that you are basting like never before.

MOST IMPORTANT NOTE:  Do all this in the morning while your children watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade (hopefully in an adjoining room), and you will have started a Thanksgiving tradition.  My 7 year-old daughter was excitedly asking about it this year.  YES!  Darn, I need a Macy’s ad!  This free advertising is killing me.