oswegatchie

Sick Day

2011-11-08T09:53:00.009-05:00

My kids pick up a lot of social history via show biz history.

Today they don't feel well, so they're lying on my bed listening to Jack Benny. This is a new diversion discovered by my son, who read about the show in Mel Blanc's autobiography.

His favorite anecdote from that book concerns an incident in which Benny huffed a hotel for refusing a room to Eddie Anderson, who played the character of Rochester.

In this clip, Rochester is on his day off, and this exchange with Jack Benny derives its humor through what it says about status. Anderson, a brilliant comic actor, has all the laugh lines and Jack Benny, despite being the one called "Boss," is incompetent to make himself breakfast. This may not be a politically progressive representation, but it's not without an element of subversion, and certainly Anderson was a national star and trailblazer at a time when finding people of color playing characters with any depth was rare.

Emergent Curriculum

2011-10-19T23:12:00.006-04:00

I've probably said before somewhere on this blog that I hate the word "curriculum," which reminds me of the word "speculum," and evokes a similar sense of discomfort and coercion.

But considered as a constellation of related objects of study, the concept has some value. Certainly constellation as a word has more sparkle.

This year my kids (12 and 14) have drafted me to help them write a screenplay. We downloaded Celtx, screenwriting freeware that lays out the text in a most professional way, and once a week we have a story meeting. Pictured here and portrayed by my daughter is a wise-talking homeless archer, one of the story's central characters, all of whom are 12-year-olds with remarkable abilities.

My job is to take dictation, help guide the script scene by scene—although the story is entirely, and I mean entirely, theirs, and make suggestions when I think of one.

I suggested, for example, that they might want to read The Writer's Journey, Christopher Vogler's popularization of narrative structure as found in the work of Joseph Campbell (and Vladimir Propp, in Morphology of the Folk Tale). Reading the introduction to that today led us to watching the Bill Moyers interviews with Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, in which he talks about the elements of the hero's journey.

The Hero's Journey is a fruitful framework for considering the X-Men movies we've been watching, and superhero comics, which entered the house in force about a year ago thanks to a weekly class my son takes at at the home of a comic book artist (also a landscape artist in the Hudson River School mode), and helped provide context for our trip to NY Comic Con this weekend, where we saw hundreds if not thousands of young people dress up as their favorite heroes of comics, novels, movies, and games. My kids had already, for years, been reading and re-reading Scott McCloud's books (Understanding Comics, Making Comics, and Reinventing Comics), which are brilliant introductions to literary and film theory in addition to being great practical guides to the craft of visual storytelling.

I think of all this as the emergent curriculum. The emergent curriculum is what happens when you follow your nose, and stands in opposition to its evil twin, the plan for instruction. The difference is directional, and calls to mind a distinction I drew earlier this evening when someone online objected to the term "occupy" being used by the Occupy Wall Street movement, complaining it was militaristic. I think of it more as reclamation than seizure, I said, of public space that has been unjustly privatized. Think of the two senses of "occupy" as the difference between colonization and squatting.

I sometimes think the main trouble with the schooling system has to do with arrows. The standards-based system of testing and pre-approved specula—oops! I mean curricula—is like an arrow directed at the learner. But learning takes place so much more effectively if the arrow is pointed out. What I'm saying is that a good teacher, an effective teacher, is receptive, a good listener. The learner is the archer.

Welcome to the Block

2011-02-01T10:13:00.006-05:00

The other day I passed some time thinking about this blog—how it has sat untended, and how my silence here might relate to my departure from the place that inspired it. Watching the dust settle, mouth shut, fingers still.

There are bloggers who post several times a day, compulsive diarists, collectors of flotsam and jetsam pertaining to a pet topic or obsession. I've often wished for a single obsession to write about, and suspect that I write, when I write, in search of one.

With these thoughts in the back of my mind I went with my husband to a birthday/housewarming party for a friend. I found myself in the kitchen with this friend's sister at one point, and reintroduced myself to her—I had met her years ago at another birthday party, also for her sister. All of a sudden she said, "Oh my God, aren't you the one who was renovating your house?" Yes, I had worked on a house, but we had sold it and moved to a neighboring town.

"I think I was on your block today!" she said. I said again that I'd moved, that if she was on my block, it wasn't really my block anymore. Her saying "your block" brought on a flood of memories of the old neighborhood and of the old house, which I drive by now and then, and think about now and then, but not all the time. I suppose I'm oriented to the present.

"No, not your block, your blog," she said.

Oh. Oh. It seems she had spent an hour on this blog, despite not being much a fan of blogs, reading the posts tagged the house. The homonymy of the two words, block and blog, the one a physical and the other a virtual place, nevertheless both "sites" one "visits", had an eerie effect on me. I thought of The Poetics of Space, a book I wrote about early on in the life of this meandering essay about a house, a family, and a lifestyle, and the domestic spaces we make and that make us.

Bachelard's book is largely about memory, and at the time I was renovating the house we have now left, I often experienced a superimposition of my future departure of and nostalgia for the house upon my actual experience of living in and working on the house. It was the same doubling of attachment and loss that Roland Barthes wrote of as defining the moment of falling in love, and as a result of those twin processes, I was in mourning for the house long before we put it on the market.

What are the odds of a physical neighbor (and stranger) becoming a virtual neighbor (and friend) in the way that happened between me and this woman? What are the odds of someone who lives geographically close to me searching the vast internet and pulling up jottings by me that speak so strongly to her? That she remembered my photograph and first name from the blog and put them together with my three-dimensional self strikes me as just as unlikely. And yet we can all cite many examples of such internet serendipity by now.

I'm grateful for this encounter with a wanderer up and down the blocks of my blog. The incident gives me new appreciation for the poetics of space, and even better, made me want to write here again.

Another

2010-08-20T11:22:00.007-04:00

An old boyfriend just blogged that his marriage may be breaking up. His wife then blogged her view of things. Both were pointed, poignant accounts of what happens to a lot of marriages in midlife that reach the point of asking what is the point. In her account, I played a very minor role. During the time he and she first fell in love, it seems, he was "attached to another." That's me: another.

The word brings up an ancient hurt. I was born to parents who gave birth to a girl. Then another, then another, then another: me. Being the other other other another has been a lifelong rut, and at midlife I still find myself negotiating my way out of it, only to slide down the wall into a puddle at the bottom now and then. Do all of us with a lot of siblings feel this way? If so, some of us lie about how it makes me feel.

I'm in rehearsal for a play right now in which I play the older of two sisters. Despite getting to be the bossy firstborn—great fun, I've done it before—I have to deal with the fact that my character is not Daddy's favorite. At one point, he tells his younger daughter that he is satisfied with his older daughter, but "I'm proud of you."

It's cathartic and instructive, of course, to mine, examine, and release what that provokes. At the same time, it's enlightening to gain access to territory more familiar to my older sisters than to me—it's sort of like being advanced to the head of the class and wearing the dunce cap at the same time. But playing variations on the theme is what invites new themes in.

Midlife is a weird, cliché place. You wonder if you made the best decisions, how things would have gone if you'd made different choices, what you should do about your keener appreciation of the shortness of life. Gangs of others' ideas about success invade when your guard is down, making off with what they can of your archived satisfactions with who you are and what you've built. The best panoply during such a break-in is to have shared some of your life with one for whom you are also the one, not another. The second best is your creativity, which may not protect you from despair, but if it won't, nothing will.

I blogged so much about that house, that house we have now left, that house that has simply fallen from my consciousness, that I should offer an update. After scouring the falling market and seeing that it would be folly to buy again—a speculation that has turned out to be right, as values continue to dive—we found a peaceful cottage at the edge of a village. We are two blocks from bustle but look out on trees and see the stars at night. And there is no mortgage. Things feel freer, more edgy, but not in a way that wakes me at 3 a.m., thinking of foreclosure. Maybe all the shifting ground under my feet will get them moving in new, productive directions. I've tried a bunch already in my life, but I intend to walk another, and another, and another.

Close But No Closure

2010-01-06T21:46:00.003-05:00

My husband pointed out that I haven't posted in here since October about our progress toward selling our home and moving. It's been a busy stretch. A buyer made an offer after one visit—she loved the house. We had an inspection and smooth renegotiation, entered contract phase. My husband and I were reviewing the language for a rider the buyer's attorney wanted to add when we received a call saying she'd faxed her attorney to pull out. There wasn't going to be a contract.

Apparently she'd been ambivalent all along, even though she'd made an offer before Thanksgiving and proposed a closing date of December 23rd. Naturally, we had gone into high gear looking for a house to buy, then to rent after feeling rushed about buying. Found a rental several blocks from our house we had to un-rent once the deal fell through.

There were boxes everywhere; we had begun packing. Most inconvenient. From what I hear, the rate of houses falling through at contract has gone up. One house we looked at was going into contract for the third time.

So what did we do? We unpacked a few boxes. Carried a whole lot more up to the attic. Got the (thankfully few) belongings out of the rental house and returned the keys. And decided to spend a lot of time with friends over the holidays. After all, the whole point of buying a beautiful home to begin with was to share it with friends, not spending all our time fixing, painting, and cleaning for prospective buyers, most of whom seem not to be looking for a historic home, not to be looking for a large home, not to be looking for what is, in essence, a lifelong art project. It was great to be here for one last solstice season. Friends came up from the city for the weekend, we hosted a New Year's Day breakfast, we reconnected with the social side of having a hospitable house. We decided to get a tree this year, a real beauty, and the aroma is still filling the room it's in.

But holidays are over, back to showing. We got a boost yesterday from Barbara Corcoran on NBC's Today Show. She listed Kingston, NY as one of the Top 10 Best Cities to buy a home in, citing good prices, good schools, and job growth.

Fishing When the Tide is Out

2009-10-06T10:09:00.007-04:00

That's what my husband says we're doing in trying to sell our house. Not only is the tide out, but there are too many of us out here knee-deep in muck, tangling our lines.

We took a walk this morning and pondered this metaphor.

The archetypal home exchange story is the one the Grimms told of the fisherman and his wife, who went from barrel to palace and back again because of her greed and his inability (and that of the prince disguised as a fish) to say no. The woman whose effrontery is so boundless, that the fish prince demotes her below her humble beginnings as a comeuppance, is half role model and half caution. I wouldn't say we're palace residents in search of a barrel, but there's an element of the fisherwoman in every real estate yarn. (See "The Mansion: A Subprime Parable," by Michael Lewis, for a good one.)

We weren't talking about that tale on our walk, but another, a fable called "The Cat and His Visions" by Arnold Lobel, in which a cat imagines a fleshy, juicy fish in a lake of lemon-butter sauce while he sits with his fishing pole. His wait drags on. Dispirited, he pictures a smaller fish. Still he catches nothing, and so his imagination contracts again and he sees a little smelt with a dollop of butter and a spray of lemon. He downgrades his desires to something utterly inadequate—let's say a minnow (we can't seem to lay our hands on the book or I'd tell the story right)—and then to an empty china plate. Suddenly, from the pit of despair, he hooks a whopper, more sumptuous than his dreams. He eats the fish with a whole ocean of lemon-butter sauce.

"Any bites yet?" people keep asking us.

It's an odd metaphor, since we don't want to eat anyone, we just want someone to enjoy the pleasure of dining in this house while we move on and enjoy dining somewhere else more suited to our present needs.

Some people recently decided not to make us an offer because, according to their realtor, they feared 'biting off more than they could chew.' They needed the smelt.

Anyway, on our walk, my husband, my son, and I decided that "The Cat and His Visions" should be our guiding vision. This will turn out better than our worst and best imaginings. Some fisher out there will be likewise delighted at the flounder that lands on their plate when they find us.

====================

This illustration by Kay Nielsen from Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Hansel and Gretel and Other Stories by the Brothers Grimm. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925.

Julie and Julia

2009-09-08T15:11:00.005-04:00

I've read a few reviews and articles about Julie and Julia, not many, but I'm struck by how impressed viewers are that a movie is taking as its subject women's creative drive and search for meaningful work.

It seems to me something subtle is going on in the dialog between the two halves of the movie, something that helps explain for me why I love the Meryl—Stanley portions so much more. Yes, these two stories 'converse' across decades about their heroines' need to find proper modes of self-expression. But the two women are driven differently—Julia longs to identify and celebrate her gifts, Julie craves recognition for talents lying fallow.

Here's where Meryl Streep's unearthly performance sets the heart of the movie on fire. Every moment she appears on screen is capable of inducing tears and laughter, regardless of what she is doing. Her passion is so present it feels like she's made herself a conduit for a natural force. Everyone should be so lucky as to have the epiphany the Julia Childs character undergoes—that what she loves—both the cooking of the food and the eating of it—can be her full-time pursuit. It's this amazing good fortune, and the fact that she shares it with such a deserving partner, that makes her story speak so strongly to women, but it's Streep's ability to tap into all that it means for women that any of us can achieve such a fusion that lifts the film to the heights it hits.

Julie doesn't fare quite so happily. She wants to succeed in a way not entirely unlike her snobbish friends (one of whom, it is pointed out, has started a blog, giving her the idea). Cooking her way through Child causes her stress (contrast her frustration and fear in the kitchen to Julia's lusty lobster bashing and onion chopping), brings about tension between her and her husband. While she may have stuck it out through the cookbook, it's clear that having a growing readership is a great inducement—the pleasure comes as much from the feedback as from the cooking and writing. Think of all those years before Julia's book even comes out, when cooking is its own reward, and compare to how many posts it took Julie to acquire a fan base and the encouragement to continue.

The Julia half of the movie tutors the Julie half, and the lesson is 'follow your bliss.' Julia and Paul steal time for one another (their lunchtime rendezvous), pay attention to one another (the quotation from Paul's letter about Julia's erotic grace in the kitchen), communicate without words (she gestures toward the buttered fish and shakes her head, he answers "I know, I know"). Their love has a couple of seasons on Julie and Eric's, and as it should, it shows. The younger couple are still finding their way with one another; Julie has yet to trust in Eric's unequivocal support.

The movie portrays successful marriages, but without forgetting that a young marriage between young people falters, alters, and grows. And its portrait of self-realizing women is nuanced enough to ask what motivates, what creates happiness, what exactly is, after all, success?

Vacation, Vacation, Vacation

2009-09-08T10:39:00.003-04:00

vacation Look up vacation at Dictionary.com
c.1386, "freedom or release" (from some activity or occupation), from O.Fr. vacation, from L. vacationem (nom. vacatio) "leisure, a being free from duty," from vacare "be empty, free, or at leisure" (see vain). Meaning "formal suspension of activity" (in ref. to schools, courts, etc.) is recorded from c.1456. As the U.S. equivalent of what in Britain is called a "holiday," it is attested from 1878.

That's from www.etymonline.com, which I love.

I don't think I've ever experienced vacation in its etymological sense quite as acutely as I did last week, after a year-and-a-half of worrying since my husband's last layoff. We have done admirably well at making ends meet by cobbling together freelance gigs and cutting back on expenses, but the intense work on the house and the uncertainty about what next have been constant companions.

My husband's mother, in an act of lavish generosity, gathered as much of her family as she could in a spacious rental house on Nantucket last week, and our biggest concern was what would we make for dinner on the night we had volunteered for mess duty. We only thought about the house once, when a friend called to see if her about-to-move brother could have a look at it, and only meant a call to the realtor.

Wavy beach or sand bar? Tandem bike or single? Burrito or taco? Contemporary novel or classic short stories? What joyful, strain-free choices.

I've vacationed before, but perhaps never from this much responsibility. Maybe our appreciation of release increases with the number and weight of the bonds vacation is releasing us from.

I'm grateful, and trying to figure out how to hang on to the feeling.

Loan Modification Diary #3

2009-09-08T10:29:00.003-04:00

Let me start off this entry by saying that if you have anything to do with selling mortgages, go away. I will reject any comment offered to this blog by salespeople.

Back in May we applied for the federal stimulus program, Making Homes Affordable. Even thought we knew we would be putting our house on the market anyway, we applied, figuring it's best to pursue any and all options.

Flash forward to August, three months later, and it turns out we are approved for a "three-month trial loan modification" (don't ask why it's a trial, I don't get it myself). Once again, they ask if our home is on the market. We call the bank. I'm too discreet to tell you which one, but it's a major major loan institution with the initials WF, whose name was popularized by a well-known song in a famous Broadway musical.

After some hemming and hawing and transfer to a higher authority, it seems we could get away with a three-month trial, do the paperwork, then put our house back on the market. Basically our financial position would be exactly the same, since our tenant, who just moved because our house is on the market, was paying us exactly the amount in rent that the loan mod would have reduced our mortgage by. Ain't that poetic?

We decided we don't have time to futz around with a trial period, we intend to sell our house, so we are staying on the market and giving up the loan modification.

It makes no sense to me, this rule that you can't put your house on the market. Everyone knows the market is very very slow. It's in everyone's interest that mortgage payments get made, that people not wind up in short sale or foreclosure, so why the rule that they can't go on the market?

Flowers in the House

2009-08-08T10:06:00.007-04:00

I don't grow a whole lot of flowers, or think about them much, or often buy them (although when I do, I love Calyx and Corolla's arrangements). Having anything to do with flowers feels so bourgeois that the word itself often embarrasses me. So I'll get around this by supporting local, organic, family farming: the flowers I'm plunking in vases around the house come from Taliaferro Farm in New Paltz.

Taliaferro is the only CSA I've ever belonged to that has a bucket full of scissors next to rows of flowers, and issues an open invitation to members to cut their own. What could be more convenient for someone trying to fill their house with sensory homeyness (although I have to admit, ours generally has homeyness to spare) without baking and having to do all those dishes?

I'm in love with this hearty trumpet-shaped flower that grows in white, pink, and purple. It doesn't rot quickly, continues to bloom in the vase, and arranges itself into exquisite gestures.

If you don't change the water daily, you risk a house that smells like marsh muck.

Farm flower sitting on my great-grandparents' farmhouse phone from Illinois:

Morning Glories

2009-08-06T10:15:00.003-04:00

Somewhere I read that morning glories will take over your yard if you let them, and someone had responded something like, So? Could there be a more happy invader?

It took me three years, but thanks to the torrential rains this summer, it finally happened: morning glories falling up a fence, spiraling along a railing. New residents need time to settle. Fences need flora. Mornings need glory.

Open House on a Blustery Day

2009-08-03T09:47:00.004-04:00

There's an unanticipated expense associated with selling your house, especially if you have kids. Let's say you have an open house scheduled for 1 pm, as we did yesterday. You get up, make breakfast, clean up breakfast, run around vacuuming-dusting-mopping, change the water in all the flower vases, get more flowers, check around outside, swish the toilets. Now you're all sweaty so you take a shower and clean the stall while you're in there. Now it's 12:30 and you have just enough time to get out of the house. You forgot to deal with packing a picnic while making breakfast, so you're going to have to find something out there...

Note to self: pack picnic before making breakfast.

Yesterday it rained during our open house. That didn't seem to cut down too much on visitors, but it gave us a hankering for the Village Tea Room in New Paltz. Local food, a menu coded for gluten-free and vegan options, local meats...it's a great place. Eating good hearty food on a rainy day makes me think of travel in England. My husband had a Ploughman's Lunch, with a rhubarb chutney, a little tub of blueberries, hunks of cheese, and a lamb pie. He had a pot of Jasmine tea; I had a pot of Brazilian peaberry coffee. Our kids ate grilled cheese and pesto pasta, and I had a salad and a stew. Hearty.

Next stop was Inquiring Minds books, where I sat with my daughter looking at books about designing rooms and tiny outbuildings for kids. She got tremendously excited about decorating her next bedroom, which she plans to cover with a mural and call her Undersea Realm. Then she showed me the secret reading space, complete with magical lights, at the back of the children's section in Inquiring Minds, what a delightful cozy nook.

Like a Rolling Stedge

2009-07-30T17:22:00.005-04:00

For many reasons, this new set of steps up the block from me makes me happy. It's made of dry-laid stone. First off, that makes me happy because it's beautiful. It calls to mind the old farm walls common in the Hudson Valley, the work of contemporary sculptors such as Andy Goldsworthy, and the contribution to my own home of its most famous former owner, quarry magnate Hewitt Boyce, who generously paved a path of bluestone slabs to our front porch steps.

Dry-laid stone is more than pleasing to the eye, though. It's practical, long-lived, and easy on the environment. This is from the web site of an organization called the Dry Stone Conservancy:

Dry stone has been a successful building technique throughout the ages because of its unique range of benefits. It provides good employment for craftsmen [sic] without working capital for heavy equipment. Masons need a minimum of tools to erect structures that are remarkably durable; yet, if damaged, are easily repaired. They resist fire, water, and insects. If correctly designed, they are earthquake resistant. The work does not deplete natural resources, and aesthetically compliments and enhances the landscape.

Dry stone structures have many advantages over mortared walls. Walls without mortar rely on the skill of the craftsmen [sic] and the forces of gravity and frictional resistance. They have a slight flexibility that allows them to conform to foundation settlement without damage. Because the sides slope slightly inward, ground movement locks the structure more tightly together.Importantly, a stiff concrete footing is not needed, saving labor and material expense.

Mortared walls have a shorter life span than drystone walls because frozen rain and snow get trapped in mortared seams and push the joints apart, whereas a correctly-built drystone wall drains naturally without damage. Accidents to mortared walls tend to break out large sections, making damage-repairs costly. Mortared walls also cost more to repair because mortared rock is not easily recyclable, requiring additional new material.

We have a brick-and-mortar planter in our backyard that we never quite got around to replacing with dry-laid stone. The ice and rain heave and erode the thing, so it spews bricks, most of them hanging on to mortar in a useless, asymmetrical way, so I take the point about not being able to recycle these bricks so easily. Plus, they don't look as nice as stone, and don't blend as well with ferns and ivy. So the practicality is my second reason for loving to walk by that new set of steps on my block.

The third reason comes from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, et al. The pattern is "Stair Seats," and refers to the human need to congregate and observe passersby from steps. One thing I love about Kingston is its roomy wraparound porches, but even homes without them such as this one can have inviting stairs to sit on, and, during the cool evenings we often experience here in the Gateway to the Catskills, they will retain the heat of the sun and become thermally advantageous sit-upons.

The fourth reason involves an appeal to other senses made by the craftsperson's sign that reads "Stone Stedge." I can't pass that sign without saying "stedge" out loud, then continuing to recite rhyming words, many of them referencing things found in the above picture: edge, ledge, hedge, sledge, dredge, fledge, wedge, sedge, you get the idea—all solid, fun-to-say words with rich sensory associations.

So what is a stedge? I could call and ask the talented masons at Stone Stedge, but I think I prefer to speculate.

Could be somebody's last name.

Or it could be a house joke, based on this meaning found at UrbanDictionary.com:

Used as a substitution for a word in a commonly known phrase, so therefore it does not obscure the nuance of the original phrase. Its sole purpose is to inspire and encourage silliness.
To stedge or not to stedge, that is the question.
If it weren’t for bad stedge I’d have no stedge at all.
If you've seen one stedge, you've seen 'em all.
Inquiring minds need to stedge.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To have a hard, soft edge
To move with ice's wedge
To be a flexible ledge
Like a rolling stedge?

Our MLS Listing

2009-07-29T09:58:00.004-04:00

The listing for our house.

OPEN HOUSE
August 2, 2009, 1 pm - 3 pm

While I'm doing some selling, I want to re-post some links about Kingston in a little piece I wrote up for Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn about our house:

Business Week named Kingston One of the top ten Best Places for Artists in America, 2007. The New York Times recently touted Kingston's real estate deals for weekenders: "The New Country Squires", The New York Times, July 2,2009. Those with elementary-age children might be interested to know that the public school two blocks from this house recently adopted a Montessori approach to teaching that just got a green light for more funding and rave reviews from parents. The annual Artists' Soapbox Derby, coming up in August, is a must. The town is going nuts with gardening and other green initiatives. And one of the best things about Kingston is the ease with which you can bop to neighboring towns (Woodstock, Rhinebeck, Bard College, Red Hook, High Falls, Stone Ridge, Rosendale, New Paltz), ski resorts, and boat-launch spots.

The Last Paint Project

2009-07-28T06:15:00.007-04:00

In the doorway to the kitchen, they have stood barefoot, Sharpie in one hand, measuring tape in the other, one eye on the calendar, the other on the elusive three-, then four-foot mark. (Too briefly, they needed help.) Sometimes unrecorded months passed, then for a few weeks they would measure and chart each other every day, argumentatively, giddily, documenting a spurt of growth or a period of acute impatience.

Remain fixed as a camera and witness the gradual: morning glories blink, the sun rolls behind the Catskills, water replenishes the fussy downstairs toilet tank. Red light!—if you could freeze, if you didn't have to feed and clothe, romp and read, you would observe the invisible increment, catch the tooth in the act of breaking through the gum. Instead of clipping back their nails, you could hold their hands in the evening under a pool of lamp light and behold the waxing of ten moons, quick as an eclipse, sudden, the way tiny shadows lengthen when they dart out to the yard of late afternoon.

Deep Energy Retrofit

2009-07-27T06:49:00.006-04:00

I've been googling "deep energy retrofit" and reading about homes renovated from the outside by having their siding ripped off, their walls built out several inches with insulation, then new siding put on.

It's the kind of thing that should be done to big old Victorians like ours, although it'll cost you. I particularly like this piece about how historic preservation and energy retrofitting needn't be at odds. We owners of our world's housing stock need some whopping rebates, breaks, and grants to bring existing buildings into line with green values, and training programs for builders in deep energy retrofitting are probably necessary.

Of course, new homes can be built to be superinsulated, like the ones in Darmstadt, Germany that are so tight they run on the body heat of their inhabitants. I have the dream of building a home from scratch just like anybody, but I still think the 'reduce, reuse, recycle' rule makes as much if not more sense when considering home ownership as it does when deciding whether to buy rice in a plastic bottle or bring a bag from home and get it from the bulk bin.

I haven't stopped thinking about the "faux Hispano-Moorish Society for Creative Anachronism" house. I have a tremendous urge to buy it, rip off the plastic shakes, lay on the foam bigtime, re-do the roof with good rain catchment, stick some solar panels up there or in the yard, and knock bigger windows out of the south side. Re-side in cedar and you've got a great-looking house steps away from a beautiful stretch of creek for kayaking. (I didn't mention over a thousand square feet of shag carpeting and acoustic tile ceiling that have to go, too, but for the right person it's a workout plan: ripping out carpet is probably what, 50 calories a square foot?)

After the last few months, I have to admit I'm tired of endless making nicey-nice. I wouldn't mind finding a place I could move into and just live for a while.

Fixations

2009-07-24T21:10:00.010-04:00

Knowing our MLS listing would go up today, I left the paint brush alone and set my mind on cleaning, planning to vacuum, dust, and mop, room by room. But before getting through all that I became obsessed with the rigorous enterprise of scrubbing creosote off the inside of the glass fireplace doors. I gave myself a good cardiac workout returning them to transparency and pondered times spent in front of that fireplace—hanging out with friends on Christmas day, reading books on the little couch we pulled to face the blaze; Power Day Off evenings lit by firelight and, sometimes, the oil lamp from my great grandparents' farm. I don't know whether it was the exertions of steel wool or memory that sent me upstairs after that for an hour's deep sleep.

When we first moved to our house, we sent out a postcard with a picture of us sitting on the front porch, and this quotation from The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard:

And after we are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Immemorial things are. We live fixations, fixations of happiness.

My husband and I started talking seriously about selling about a year ago, and the pendulum swing from yes to no has slowed, but not yet ceased. I can only imagine the pain of people who've gone through foreclosure, the rugs literally pulled out from under them, how it must feel to flee and leave one's possessions, or have strangers come and take things away.

I would like to say I've gotten used to the idea of leaving, but I haven't.
Maybe I need a clearer idea of where we're headed. For a place to replace this one in our hearts it must be just as magical. I hope the next owner will feel as strongly as we did about making the house greener and more energy efficient while preserving its history.

Here's a whimsical sale blurb I wrote for Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn (hoping another Brooklynite might move up here and take over!):

Amenities: Cozy sun room with hearth, overlooking peach tree. Rainbow fairy staircase realm, favorable flow from room to room, wall-gliding sunlight panels, forehead-cooling marble mantelpieces. AAA hide-and-seek rating. Squirrel antic observation corner. Breakfast with birds. Airy mansard attic fit for future majestic master bedroom or eccentric artist's playground or use your imagination. Seat 16 for Thanksgiving. Backyard foraging for raspberries in summer.

I wish all real estate listings could be written that way, knowing that what is really bought and sold, paradoxically, are intangibles that can never be bought and sold—memory, childhood, yesterday.

All Over the Place

2009-07-18T23:26:00.010-04:00

With our house days from going on the market, my husband and I decided to look at a 'property' today, in hopes of stirring up some affection for the task of making another home.

I knew the place was a long shot, but under what my friend/realtor's husband called the "faux Hispano-Moorish décor"—picture three-quarter-sized suits of armor, knives and pistols, glass decanters, nonfunctional weldware—were, I hoped, good bones. I knew the foundation was concrete block (wishful thinking: thermal mass!), there were a couple of interesting masonry fireplaces and potentially good light, and a peaceful siting across the road from a creek that reminds me of my childhood summer home. The 70s makeover of a 50s structure, with its wall-to-wall shag, iron-and-colored-glass chain lamp, and glitter stucco, all brought back my youth. I thought of Nixon resigning, of gas siphoning and the energy crisis, and of the Jackson 5 cartoon show.

After an hour of knocking on cheap paneling, poking at acoustic ceiling to see what lay beneath, sniffing for mold, and mentally reconfiguring the layout, I realized that the first 100K would solely address aesthetic issues. That would leave little dough for potential structural issues (flat roof, a leak at the foundation, the unknown?) and sustainability investments (geothermal, solar, rain catchment...all the stuff we didn't get to in our present house but feel is essential next time out). Photo above right: here I discover that what I thought was cedar shake with an unfortunate coat of white paint is actually a plastic facsimile thereof.

I also felt I was kind of in Lalaland even to consider home ownership and all its uncertainties. It was a big relief to come home to the solid plaster walls and massive beams in this admittedly oversized but exquisitely crafted house. At the moment, I can't bear to think about leaving. The endless thought experiments ennervate me.

Through the day I exchanged emails with a friend who is a professor. I mentioned the difficulty of inhabiting these different scenarios, and he corrected me, pointing out that "inhabit" is an interesting word that inappropriately conjures images of stability. He wrote:

what i see in me and other people right now, is a struggle to learn the new rules of the game. it's more fluctuating in disbelief between positions and states of mind rather than inhabiting these places. in some cases, people are quite desperate and very angry as they have lost jobs and about to lose their homes. my students this past 2 semesters were all over the place, unable to concentrate or think properly.

After we looked at the house we went to our friends'/realtor's cabin a dozen lots up the road and sat on their porch overlooking the creek. We decided that the most suitable role for the building we had just carefully considered, and rejected, would be as headquarters for the Society for Creative Anachronism, and maybe not just because of the heraldry paraphernalia. The sense of chronological misplacement on entering rooms reminiscent of the decade when I was growing up, distracted by worries about an economy compared to, but less gentler and more absurdly abstract than, the Depression of my parents' childhood, with the miniature medieval gewgaws all about, was soulspinning.

We are not among the desperate, and we know it's happenstance that put us in good digs. I do feel angry though—most of all on behalf of the above-mentioned students or people who have been foreclosed on rather than helped to stay in their homes, or those taxed out of houses on one hand while being told they can't have renters on the other. What good is an increasing vacancy rate to anyone?

What It's Like to Sell a House: A Study in Tropes

2009-07-16T10:57:00.006-04:00

There is no getting around how incredibly anxiety-provoking it is to sell a house, but I want to focus for the moment on the exhaustion brought on by the trying
on of possibilities.

The uncertainty of what next must be resolved somehow, and you do it, if you're like me, by imagining and attaching to different scenarios, one every 24 hours.

1. There's a Place for Us: It's like having a calling...there's a town, city, mountain out there with your name on it, with all the amenities you need. It leads you to websites like findyourspot.com or Who's Your City?, You take endless surveys, read 'best places' books and sites, interview friends in farflung quarters. You attach to Elsewhere. You become Place: 'I'm a mid-sized city;' 'No sales tax and a running trail circling a lake, that's me,' 'Give me a house by a creek so I can be Staycationland,' 'Walkable town with rail trail and a bus to a major metropolis will do me dandy.'

2. Open Road: Refurbish an Airstream with some solar panels, put your stuff in a Pod, and hit the road. Live small for a while (despite the crappy gas mileage, you'll likely reduce your carbon footprint, or even better, if you're DIY enough, you'll go biodiesel), give the kids an alternative tour of the U.S., forget what it's like to pay an electric bill or mow. Visit all those Facebook friends—f2f! Endless reading of blogs that link from Roadschooling.

3. Back Where You Came From: Why did we move to this house, anyway? Weren't things okay before? Can we go back? Wasn't that where we belonged? The roots myth pretends to be stable and definite, but soon reveals itself otherwise as each of your various roots presents itself as the authentic, deepest delving, original tendril.

4. Grow Where You're Planted: Let's just find a smaller version of this house, one we can afford, one we can retrofit green, let's set out on foot and check everything for sale we can find, let's not disrupt our life, our cat's routines, our friendships, our systems...let's not relive the stress to be found in Square One.

What settles over the whole of this cycling, or beneath it, as an undertow, is a kind of ennui. Normal enthusiasms, necessarily shelved for the moment, give intimations of having disappeared completely. The lists and dreamy conversations that led us to leave the city and make a new life, peremptorily cut short, it seems, are more scattered now than they were then. My husband and I find ourselves skittering along too many hypothetical paths. Or maybe the right image is of two actors madly changing costumes in a dressing room, trying to prepare to go on stage for any and all plays (some of them apocalyptic). The word 'trope,' related to the idea of turning, feels apt. We are turning, turning, turning, and right now, I feel dizzy.

You Just...

2009-06-27T07:27:00.005-04:00

A recurring joke around our house, since we decided to move, is the sentence that begins with "You just...," as in, "Oh, that's not hard to fix, you just knock out the old plaster and re-do it," or "Why don't you just refinish all the floors downstairs? It will make the house sell faster," or "If you just get rid of half your stuff, this space will show better," or "You just seal all that up with some caulk."

I've had four months of "you just." I'm starting to relate to the people who have to flee after foreclosure, the ones who don't have the time, energy, or space to "just" take their plasma TV with them, or their books or tchotchkes or anything, so that it all winds up in a dumpster when the inevitable strangers come to clear the place out. Why didn't they just take some of their cherished possessions? They'd reached their just limit.

Goodness knows, it's great to have a shelter over your head, especially a beautiful, well-tended one like we hope to pass on to an equally loving next occupant, this museum of fine details from a time when craft, taste, and material each held their own and justified the others, this archive of happy family memories—ours and, you can feel it the moment you walk through the door—many others'.

But an old house, above all, is a giant neon sign flashing "You just." If I didn't have so many other "You just" lists, I wouldn't so much mind the length of this one. Still, there's something supremely satisfying, even amidst the smoking embers of burnout, about crossing items off the "you just" list. Tick, tick, tick.

Grahampa's Chair

2009-06-16T22:55:00.006-04:00

My Grahampa Graham (I'm spelling that the way I thought it was spelled when I was a kid) was a doctor. This was his chair. When I was growing up, my dad used it as a desk chair. It was stained a dark wine color, and there was gray vinyl padding covering the back.

In the early '80s my parents decided to get rid of the chair. Periodically, they would shed old stuff, and the chair's time had come. But I liked it; I thought it had historical value, or at least sentimental value. I had never known my grandfather, who died of pneumonia overworking himself during the war. He had told women they were pregnant while sitting in that chair; he had a maternity ward named after him in Syracuse; the chair was important. Besides, I was sure it would look good if I sanded and refinished it.

So I did, and it then accompanied me to each of my seven New York apartments, beginning in Brooklyn, where my childhood friend and first roommate painted a portrait of it (see below), and on to the dream house my husband and I are about to sell.

I can appreciate my parents' urge to give away the chair 30 years ago. I have read a lot of books about organizing and simple living (in lieu of organizing my stuff and living more simply), and one thing they say is, if you put something away for six months and don't miss it, just lose it: you don't need it.

I'd been noticing that I don't actually sit in Grahampa Graham's chair that much. Mostly, I throw a sweatshirt on it. It takes up floor space. Months go by and I don't so much as look at the chair or think about the man who sat in it. So I came to the conclusion that I should let it go. But before I did that, I emailed my siblings to tell them my plan, just in case any of them wanted it. One of my sisters thought she might, and she mentioned it to my dad.

As it turns out, my dad passionately wants the chair. Nearly 30 years without it, and he now wants it back. What do you think of that, professional organizers? Toward the end of his life, my dad finds himself needing to sit in his dad's chair. How fortunate that it's still in the family. So, my sisters and I are giving it to him for...you guessed it, Father's Day. A variation on the theme of regifting: passing heirlooms around from one family member to another. A lot of that goes on with us. When Dad is done with it, maybe I'll need it back again.

Sometimes it's hard to predict when, and how much, it will hurt to have given something away. I'm trying to be careful what I let go of right now, because after seven years of accumulation in a house with an attic so big my husband and I could have started a sofa collection, I'm ready to part with stuff impulsively, brutally, and, I have to remember, irrevocably.

Red Eft's Homeschooling Burnout Kit

2009-06-06T06:46:00.006-04:00

A friend emailed my local homeschooling list and asked what people's strategies are for handling burnout. Here are my biggies.

1. Do less. During burnout, I have to pull back and ask if I'm worrying too much
about field trips, what the kids are doing, etc. I remember I can trust them to be
doing interesting things. I'm still wading through all the books, art, media, etc.
they have produced while I had to attend to other things.

2. Go away—have an R&R weekend with a friend or family member, go to a conference or colony or institute of some kind. It helps to have a supportive partner who works at home, but family and friends may be willing to help.

3. Attend to your own creative life. I can't let that slide too much, or on top of burnout, I'll have rage. This one is hardest because I have trouble not comparing myself to others in various fields that I feel have 'accomplished more' during the period I
was homeschooling. Also, I now have to work for extra money so where's the
time for creative stuff? But I do what I can work in, knowing that I go through cycles when I have more time for myself.

4. Remember that hs'ing is "a front-loaded proposition." A woman my husband and I met with early on to explore hs'ing called it that, and the phrase returns to me often.
All the time we put in during the early years helping our children develop into self-directed explorers of their interests makes it easier, year by year.

5. Find families that fit for childcare trades. We've done a bit of this, I'd like to have done more. The kids love it.

6. If you're feeling burnout, do something about it right away. Have an arrangement
with your partner and/or closest friends where you can say "Emergency! I need a day
off right now!" I could be better at this. Right now it seems like all my friends are equally overloaded, and there's no one to appeal to. That makes it trickiest of all.

7. Keep the Teenage Liberation Handbook or some other ridiculously inspiring book
nearby to dip in when you need fresh inspiration. Even a phrase to call on in times of need is helpful (like the above-mentioned 'front-loaded proposition.' Another one I like is from the Tao Te Ching: "Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.") You need a mantra to remind you that it's not all on your shoulders. You're only one mineral in the soil.

"My dreams torment me, but they're not bad..."

2009-05-29T10:20:00.006-04:00

My daughter is writing a story about a place called the Valley of Sadness. In order to write this, she sometimes sits at the computer, sometimes writes in her journal, or, like this morning, puts sentences on little scraps of paper, hurrying sudden ideas to the page, any page, to be written down before they disappear.

This is the luxury of creative process that I would like to see everyone have: enough solitude, enough time, and enough lack of tampering to hear those voices and run to scraps of paper to record them. It is only by living apart from other interfering voices that we can hear the ones we carry inside us.

The snatch of monologue above is a perfect example, I think, of what the voices say when you listen to them. "My dreams torment me, but they're not bad." People who work with the human energy field as healers sometimes call it "being in allow:" in this case, the idea that if you allow emotions their honest expression, they may surprise you. What seems negative may not be negative. You may be tormented, but that might not be bad.

The above picture shows how she holds her pencil between the third and fourth fingers—in standard parlance, the "wrong way." But it's her way, and I can relate: after trying to sit cross-legged to meditate, and finding again and again that I'd rather kneel with my cushion under my butt, I have abandoned the correct position for my own. Now I can focus on my breathing!

So-Called Friend of My Youth

2009-05-28T16:24:00.003-04:00

When I was a kid, traipsing up and down a little grassy hill from our summer camp in St. Lawrence County to and from the lake where I swam, I delighted in the sight of the orange flower we called devil's paint brush. I loved its yellow center with orange ring, its fuzzy green leaves, its sprightly emergence from the grass around it, I even liked the way it died when I cut it and put it in water, the way a dandelion does.

So I was moved to see it on my back patio last year, hundreds of miles south of the lake, right here in Ulster County. I thought of the herbalist's maxim that the botanicals you need tend to follow you, and I was seized by the mystical notion that I needed this blossom, vibrant with lower chakra energy, in my zone. Then it occurred to me that maybe, more prosaically, it had hitched a ride back from the lake on my shoe and fallen on the patio while I was hanging laundry. I pried it out from between bricks to plant it in a proper garden plot. I even tried to get it to winter over inside, though it wasn't happy and shriveled in my window. Here in the picture is the first one up this spring.

One problemo: this lovely flower, brought here from Europe by enthusiastic fans, is taking over the country. Considered a major pest out west, Orange Hawkweed, as it's more commonly known, or Pilosella aurantiaca as known by botanists, is warned against by those who have seen it overtake meadows, fail to nurture livestock, and even kill plants trying to bed down next to it. My little buddy is an Invader and Pillager!

I will have to think of another botanical friend of my youth to get all misty-eyed about—maybe Indian pipes or water lilies. The New York Flora Association is a nonprofit field botany education group that's creating an atlas of native flora in the state. Looks like a good resource for running a background check on one's little seed-spreading friends.

Loan Modification Diary #2

2009-05-19T08:49:00.002-04:00

Monday, May 18, about a week after requesting a loan modification, we got the "worksheet" from our mortgage company to fill out and fax back with a "hardship statement," a copy of our last tax return, and copies of our income.

The letter wasn't signed, and the phone number went to the top of the tree, so that required going through their system again.

My husband faxed the form and called to verify that it had been received legibly, as we were instructed to do.

"It takes three days for the form to show up online," said the representative.

My husband found this irritating, since he wrote a program in 1994 that allows one to fax a document to the web instantaneously. According to this representative, somebody has to scan the fax so it can be viewed online.

"That's not what the rep said last week," I said. "She said the fax would be electronically captured and viewable online right away—that's how the loan will be reviewed."

Just a single facet of a huge, sparkling bureaucacy.

Let's hope the loan at the end of this costs less than the one we have now. This article in The Nation (More Mortgage Madness, April 29, 2009) is not raising my hopes.

It's a Mod Mod Mod Mod Mortgage: Loan Modification Diary #1

2009-05-15T06:58:00.007-04:00

If you're trying to renegotiate your mortgage, some info here may help you...GOOD LUCK!

One of the many paths my husband and I are scurrying down at present relates to mortgage renegotiation.

I can't go one step further in talking about our mortgage without pasting from etymonline:

1390, from O.Fr. morgage (13c.), mort gaige, lit. "dead pledge" (replaced in modern Fr. by hypothèque), from mort "dead" + gage "pledge;" so called because the deal dies either when the debt is paid or when payment fails. O.Fr. mort is from V.L. *mortus "dead," from L. mortuus, pp. of mori "to die" (see mortal). The verb is first attested 1467.

Could there be a better name for this system than "dead pledge?"

Like I said, I'm scurrying down many paths, but I'll have to forgo that one and talk about the stimulus package, which, after being shooed away by our Wells Fargo mortgage broker on our first try, we now seem to have a hope of qualifying for. In case you do too, and you are utterly confused, here's what I can share:

The first hump to get over with the stim package is finding the right website. Apparently, everybody and their sister wants you to know they are offering "Hope for Homeowners." Save yourself some google pain and a visit to Mr. ScamMan and head right to:

http://makinghomeaffordable.gov/

Here you will find a nice big button to click on that says "Find out if you are eligible." Click it and take the test, grateful that it could lead to thousands of dollars of relief, more than you can say for the "Are You a Music Master?" quiz on Facebook. This is the first screen for eligibility for refinancing, or for loan modification, which offers more relief.

Because my husband (primary earner) was laid off one year ago, and therefore can show one and not two years of self-employment on our taxes, we were ineligible for refinancing before the stim package. Our other roadblock, believe it or not, was that our payments were current. The stim package money, unlike everyday bank refi, apparently is not contingent on your failing to make payments.

The governmental program is confusing, because it's called variously "the stimulus package," "Hope for Homeowners," "Making Home Affordable," or "HARP" (that's the refinancing portion), depending on whom you're talking to.

In our case, we went back to our mortgage broker and said the magic words: "We took the eligibility quiz at the Making Home Affordable website and it says we are eligible for both refinancing and loan modification. We would like to be considered for loan modification under the Making Home Affordable program."

That led to two more phone calls—one to a more central office of the bank that holds our mortgage, and a second to an 800 number of the same bank that is taking all requests to apply for this program.

The agent interviewed us at length about our mortgage particulars and expenses, then we were told an application will be sent out. Here's what the schedule looks like as of May 2009:

-5-7 days to get application
-30-45 business days to hear anything

They are getting a lot of calls. I called back a few days later to see if the application had gone out. It had, but the helpful person I reached gave me the following good advice:

-call back twice a week to see how your application is progressing
-anything you fax is being captured electronically, and there can be problems with transmission, so call after any fax to be sure all pages were received and that they were legible

Mileage may vary with your bank, but if you're in this process too, good luck

Stray Thoughts Found Under the Ceiling

2009-05-14T17:05:00.004-04:00

Latest project: replacing a small bathroom ceiling, the casualty of an old leak from the days before we put a giant rubber diaper on the roof.

I'm not a fan of exposed lath. Something's hiding behind there in the dark. It makes me think of every horror movie I've ever seen. I don't even want to say their names—you know the ones I mean, the ones that resonate with the theory popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point that broken windows and other signs of dereliction correlate with increased crime rates.

I think about this a lot, because I live in a neighborhood where the homes run the gamut from kempt to unkempt, words that derived from the Old High German for "combed." The fanatically tidy properties are just that: they look like their caretakers comb the lawns, paint constantly with a nail brush for added accuracy (though you never see them do it), and buff their windows with rabbit muffs. In their way, they make me as uneasy as the unkempt places.

We lie somewhere between on the kemptitude scale. Having read that health favors a grown-in lawn, I keep ours at four or five inches, mowing with my rotary pusher from Sears,leaving the cuttings as fertilizer, and I gotta say our grass is lush. Our yews are tangled, with shoots of lime green waiting to be lopped off. We are capable of leaving a frisbee on the lawn or a scooter on the porch. It's the 'lived-in' look you want in a community. You want evidence of human habitation, and broken windows and empty half-inch lawns, abandonment and sterility, say the same thing: nobody is around.

I'm trying to imagine a movie in which broken drywall is as scary as exposed lath, but I can't. Broken drywall isn't scary. Drywall is scary when it's perfect and new.

Going back to our kemptitude scale, the horror genre has, on the one hand, unkempt broken lath horror films, and on the other, fanatically kempt one-inch grass horror films.

Lath-and-plaster aren't scary when they are perfect and new because they are never perfect and new, the imperfections of form and surface are what make these materials sing.

That said, I think we're about to cover that ceiling lath with a big piece of plywood.

Meet the Comparables

2009-05-12T22:44:00.006-04:00

Yesterday I went with an agent to check out houses that fall roughly in the same range as our house (although it still hasn't been priced). The idea was for me to see what's out there, what's selling or isn't, how much and what kind of work people are doing or not doing before putting their house on the market, and most important, how much should we charge? I didn't get an answer to my question—so much is uncertain right now—but I did discover that I'm plenty opinionated when it comes to home decorating.

The first house was a Victorian-era brick affair with lots and lots of rooms, including a ground-level apartment with a separate entry. The owners had done a great job spiffing up the place—muted paint colors, a new kitchen with simple cabinets and soapstone counters, and a wood deck out back with a view of the Catskill mountains, if one's chair were carefully placed.

After that, things got ugly.

A house with a generous wraparound porch that promised a lot delivered a dreary vestibule painted the darkest possible shade of olive green. The kitchen had been redone, in defiance of the period architecture, with 70s track lighting and vinyl flooring. The bedrooms had that "asymmetry is interesting but where will I put the bed" configuration, and in the finished attic we found not just tin ceilings but tin walls, which, I learned, cause vertigo, at least in this experimental subject.

There was a mansion that had the feng shui of a fun house, with passages leading to dead ends, pillars without purpose, and a kitchen counter jutting from the stove at a 45-degree angle that gave my hip a bruise just to look at it. The furniture said, well, screamed actually, "Don't you dare touch me!" Nothing personable had been left to help a visitor envision living there. Such is the fallout of the methods of staging. More on the loathesome practice of staging homes in a post to come.

One house with tons of square footage had it oddly distributed: a tiny vestibule that made me duck opened to a grand but useless hall lined with metallic, tropically themed paper from the 70s (19-, not 18-); a suite of parlors painted espresso brown—I'm being nice by calling it espresso—were unable to be illuminated (for some reason the switches weren't working), so they hid whatever treasures they may have offered to make up for the wall-to-wall olive green shag. I like olive green in the right place at the right time, but I don't think a potential buyer should be wandering through a home saying "I can't see a thing in here; is that a door or a book case?"

Then there was the place that hadn't sold after months on the market. The other realtors had been beating their heads against the wall trying to figure out why. My guide and I walked in, turned to one another and said, "It's the smell." In the kitchen, a loud belch erupted from the plumbing. I made a note, "the sink has something to say." A house with a strong odor—whether from bleach, a burning scented candle, or in this case, I suspect, a toxic chemical cleanser—has something to hide. So does a house with wall-to-wall rugs. Why are people so enamored of woolly, dust-loving fibers under their feet? I left with a sore throat and that Matrix sense that the house was an illusion disguising some horrible truth we'd need a red pill to get to the bottom of.

If this sounds like a cranky rant about people's rotten taste, it is. Since I'm flapping my gums about this, here's how I think a house should be prepared inexpensively for market: repair cracks and prime the walls that need it. If painting, light, airy shades show a house off best, and my guess is, neutral is preferable. There's a dark shade of purplish-red that is quite common in decorating, it's a color that comes with an odor, or maybe that's my own synaesthetic response, but imagine a cloying, commercial smell, let's call it Country Berry Pie; it makes me nauseous—especially in bathrooms and in wallpaper strips people inexplicably love to paste under perfectly beautiful moldings. When I see this color I'm done. A few steps away from blue toward yellow on the red scale, though,and I'm fine. Maybe everybody has these sensitivities; maybe they govern the pace at which a home sells.

Color aside, working lights and plumbing are most appealing; I'd go so far as to say: necessary. As for the bayberry tea lights some folks leave mysteriously burning to welcome visitors, I wish they'd save them for a romantic evening. They make me gag.

The Parlor Plaster

2009-05-11T10:40:00.009-04:00

We have two parlors with marble fireplaces and antique mirrors, behind which we never looked until recently. In our seven years in this house, we've never gotten around to painting these rooms and filling them with bookshelves. I imagined a little window seat in the front parlor, and cupboards below the shelves, for board games. The back parlor is our music room, it's where we keep our piano. The mirrors are a bit over-the-top for me—we didn't buy a Victorian house because we like the Victorian aesthetic. We bought the house because it's a happy, rambling, lovable house.

As it turns out, the mirror in the front parlor concealed something rather unfortunate and scary, a bulge like something out of a Cronenberg movie.

No matter how much you love your house, you don't want it to breathe.

You don't want the sense that your house is about to vomit on you, or something worse.

This wall was that kind of wall. Creepy.

Once we had carefully and nervously removed the heavy, valuable mirror from the wall without breaking it, I got a good look at the bulge. As if I didn't need more evidence that my house is just another version of my body, the damage, most likely the remains of a long-ago-addressed leak, reminded me of the belly cast my husband and I tried—and miserably but hilariously failed—to take when I was nine months pregnant with my son.

Well, we got our restoration craftsman to come, circle the room in plastic, and knock it out. Now it's looking fine.

It never ceases to amaze me how frightening it is when even a hairline crack appears in one's house, yet how relatively easy it is to address most problems. Most, anyway. Maybe a house with nothing wrong, nothing showing that's wrong, is similar to a false sense of security. It's just a matter of time before things get thrown out of balance. Lately, I'm getting to appreciate the false sense of security. It's better than no security at all. In fact, we should be really grateful for any sense of security. Its falseness matters no more than an effective placebo's falseness matters. What matters is the effectiveness. What matters is feeling good, right?

Knocking out old crumbly walls and laying down a fresh skimcoat feels good: cool, smooth, clean plaster. No cracks here.

Reclaim-It-Yourself

2009-05-06T08:12:00.005-04:00

We're in the process of replacing some basement windows that have rotted around the edges because they were in contact with the earth. Of course, plenty of people replace perfectly good windows for other reasons, e.g., to replace them with more efficient ones, and they leave them out on the street. A special little truck comes and takes them, but anybody could take them.

We have a bunch of bricks in our backyard sort of lying around, that we're about to put on the Yahoo group, Hudson Valley Ecycle. And bricks wash up on the shores of the Hudson River all the time thanks to the old brickyards—aesthetically distressed by the tides! It's a public service to haul them away. A former next door neighbor of ours scored some large bluestone tiles to use on his patio, when he noticed that the town of Hurley was mysteriously yanking and trashing its historic sidewalks. And there are abundant sources of junk metal for the enterprising welder.

It strikes me that Ulster County is a good place to build your own house of found materials, if you're handy enough, have the time, and own a pick-up truck. What you don't find by driving around, I imagine you could find on Ecycle or elsewhere on the internet, or through Hudson Valley Materials Exchange, or some other way. How about an annual award for the most recycled+reclaimed house? It could be the sadder-but-wiser sibling of those fancy LEED competitions. I'm willing to bet that the lower carbon footprint is made by the scavenger.

Oil Up with Golden Flax

2009-04-24T07:02:00.005-04:00

It's a smell of after-hours, moonlighting, passion; it comes with images—slugs of paint in all colors, with a tactile sensation—the slide of oil paste beneath a thin metal palette knife, with a sound—a clinking brush stirred quickly in a baby-food jar of turpentine. Smell of linseed oil, and memories of watching my dad paint, after he got home from work and on weekends.

I spent a weekend recently rubbing linseed oil into the wood in my dining room, wood once covered in a lifeless shade of blue paint, which was only the latest of around ten layers I think I counted at one point. As I scraped I could sometimes see them all at once, like the rings of a tree, from wood to creamy milk paint to something scary from the 50s or 60s right up to the blue. I could almost hear the wood's sigh of relief as I scraped all that gunk off it.

I don't like paint on wood or walls. I like a nice plain of plaster with its fine grain, hairline cracks, and skid marks from the trowel. (I hope I can tolerate going back to the construction equivalent of fast food after living here, 'cause Sheetrock, USA is most likely where I'm headed).

Give me some raw woodwork and a bottle of linseed (I used it straight, but I also used a nice polymerized linseed oil by Tried and True in Trumansburg, NY). Give me a tablespoon of flax oil on my oatmeal every morning and I feel even better. You can make clothes out the stuff, too...flax and hemp, the basic needs-meeters.

People who come into our dining room now are moved by the scent; they comment on it. Either they are artists and they love it because they're at home in a linseed atmosphere, or it brings back a happy memory of making art or being near art making. There's no pattern in A Pattern Language for smells, is there? —maybe there should be: Lavender Drawers at the Top of the Stairs, Aromatic Pathways to the Kitchen, Pockets of Linseed Memory...

The Missing Prosperity Corner

2009-04-17T11:40:00.005-04:00

^ BEFORE ^

It goes something like this...I am reading about feng shui, a sporadic hobby that coincides with my feeling like things are sliding out of control, in other words, my husband has been laid off again.

"Here's the problem, honey. No prosperity bagua! Look, that whole corner of the house is missing—there's nothing there but that brick patio with the moss and the tufts of grass."

My husband objects to the theory that the root of his professional rootlessness can be explained by feng shui. It's the economy, and before that it was the dot-com bubble pop, ya dope!

"Ah hah! But the last time I put a purple flowering plant in our prosperity corner, you got that job with the emergency notification people!"

Why did I lose that job then?

"Because the purple plant died when winter came, and I didn't replace it with another purple royalty object to draw prosperity chi to the missing bagua!"

My garbled, simpleton's rendition sounds strange even to myself, but I know there's wisdom in philosophies of color and placement in the home, whether feng shui, Vaastu Shastra, or just common sense. Lately, I'm willing to go around closing toilet lids, which everyone is always leaving open, draining chi out of our bank account. "Cluttered house, cluttered mind!," I have been known to snap at others (though I may be the chief pile-maker around here). I am not too proud to sleep with a box of coins under the bed, and there's that new energizing-red front door, mentioned in my last post.

Comparatively speaking, of course, my husband and I are materially and metaphorically prosperous. We are rich in children and the time to be with them, we are healthy and happy, and if neither of us has hit it big in the fame and fortune category, it's been because our definition of prosperity is what it is, what we've chosen.

But none of that stopped me from marking our prosperity corner with Plum Pudding Coral Bells the other day, in the hope of getting our asking price, in honor of spring, to summon a nice family to take over for us here, or as a wish that everybody everywhere, government and governed alike may be wealthy, healthy, and wise...take your pick.

v AFTER v Plum Pudding Prosperity Plant

All Hands on Deck

2009-04-14T07:18:00.005-04:00

I think we identify with our houses like we identify with our cars (I can't be the only one who feels sated after a filler-up at the gas station). Working on my house, better yet, having a crew of other people work on my house, has always felt like self-care to me; the confusion runs deep enough that it didn't surprise me when a friend, offering to help paint, said "Benjamin Moore is my boyfriend!"

But the labor gives me sore hands and shoulders, so I've resorted to less metaphorical body work twice in the past two weeks. I'm fortunate to have had someone recommended to me—two years before I finally went to see her, unfortunately—who is extraordinarily gifted, and achy shoulders and that twinge behind my left scapula are already nearly gone.

I wonder why, when some of the most gifted healers we have are massage therapists, reflexologists, and people who fall under the hazy but nonetheless invaluable rubric of energy work, our plans for better national health coverage don't include these modalities as 'preventive medicine?' Preventive medicine is still viewed largely as screening programs, which are fine as far as they go, and sometimes fitness club memberships or a nutrition class here and there, which are also fine as far as they go.

I can feel the pain draining down my arm and out my fingers as I write this. Massage is good for the muscles, the lymph, the adrenals, the spirit. Maybe it could be the tar and paint job for our ship of state, too. With the stress of economic and other upheavals, with all our knots and blockages related to addictive military spending and gay rights, with all the bold and subtle signs of imbalance around us, mightn't our body politic benefit from a crew of massage therapists?

Kingston Retrofit

2009-04-13T08:30:00.003-04:00

For a time I considered calling this blog "Kingston Retrofit," and focusing on our slow and careful process of remaking our 19th-century Victorian house into a 21st-century sustainable refuge. I decided instead to blog about whatever interested me on any given day, but as I look back over the years writing this blog, which is mostly about my children's youth, our field trips and holidays and dreams, our unschooling experiences, and our aspirations toward living more sustainably, what I've blogged about has always circled around the house. It's the column that's supported our life for seven years, and like any good column, it shifts with the movements of the earth, it's sturdy yet flexible. "My staircase, my spine," as I called an early post.

My husband and I have loved living in an old house, and all it has to offer: the craft involved in the building and all its details, from mouldings to plaster to stone; the great ventilation that makes an absurdity of an idea like air conditioning; the pride of preservation. We've had a great life here, and it's ending a little sooner than we thought it would. Halfway to adulthood, our children find their parents looking for a new place to raise them, when we thought it would be here, just here.

Speaking as one of millions of people putting their homes on the market right now, I have to say the hard part is dealing with change and uncertainty. We don't know where we're going, if we'll buy again, whether we can keep some bigger things like our piano. All we know is: smaller place, lower expenses. I'm having to get used to not knowing, and not forcing the issue before its time.

Meditating helps. Contemplating impermanence helps. But what triggers anxiety about impermanence and change more than the loss of home? The word "home" is a promise of stability, reliability. Home is a repository of memory; without the home, where are the memories? Home represents the meeting of all the other basic needs: home is shelter, food, warmth. This is why homelessness, and a country that doesn't address homelessness, is such a core issue of justice and compassion, why "foreclosure" sounds like "murder" to many of us.

So right now I'm scraping and painting, sifting and weeding and ecycling, raking and edging and planting, making nicey-nice and staging. I'm finishing household projects (for someone else) begun years ago (for me). I'm re-reading books about feng shui and hoping the chi starts bum-rushing this place soon. How do you like the red front door, by the way? I can feel the pumped-up chi traffic already.

I'll blog the journey, knowing it's one a lot of us are making these days.

Aria Grill, Kingston, NY

2009-04-10T14:32:00.004-04:00

It took me six months too long to check out Aria Grill on Broadway in Kingston.

Its owner, Peter Barak, is also owner of Peter B's, a deli run by his parents and brother (the family moved here from Queens several years ago) on Wall Street in Kingston, a good place to pick up warm bagels and a cup of coffee.

Peter returned to his roots to make the menu for Aria, which serves Afghan and Persian foods in a soothing, candlelit open space. My two children, my husband, and I had sambosa with yogurt sauce, naringe palau (rice with saffron, orange peels, almonds, pistachios), shrimp kabob, and lamb korma—all delicious and prepared with care. We sprinkled just about everything with a table condiment we had never tried before, but are now devotees of, made from dried, ground sumac, commonly used in Mediterranean kabob rubs. The Afghani green tea spiced with cardamom, hot and fragrant, came in a nice big kettle. Peter visited the table to chat and see how we liked everything. We gushed.

We were too full for bakhlava, firni (rosewater pudding), or sheer biringe (rice pudding). Lunch special is $8.99; it could become a habit.

STAR Exemption for NYS Homeowners

2009-03-03T08:56:00.003-05:00

What is a STAR Exemption? I never heard of one when I lived in Brooklyn. I moved to Kingston and didn't hear of it for six years. Then, last year, a dear friend who is also a realtor mentioned it to me and my husband.

From the New York state web site:

"The Basic STAR exemption is available for owner-occupied, primary residences regardless of the owners' ages or incomes. Basic STAR works by exempting the first $30,000 of the full value of a home from school taxes."

You have to get the form from the web site, where you can download a PDF, or go to the assessor's office for your municipality. Both last year and this, when I looked at the forms with my husband, we got confused and thought we made too much money for the Basic Star exemption. We didn't. No one does.

But the form asks for your age and your income. This is only to determine your eligibility for the second kind of STAR Exemption, called "Enhanced." If you live in your home and it is your primary residence, you qualify for the basic exemption.

We almost missed yesterday's deadline of March 2. Luckily, our above-mentioned friend walked us through downloading the forms, found out that the deadline was a postmark deadline, so that as the day grew longer, city offices closed and the post office closed, we still had a chance to squeak our form in. "Go to Staples," she emailed me at 8 pm. "They're a UPS center and they're open until 9."

So we did. And as back-up, my husband went to City Hall at 8:15 am to hand another application to a staff person as soon as they arrived. We need every penny now, and so does everyone else.

I hope this info finds its way to another person who didn't know about this program!

New Owners at Burgevin's

2009-03-02T16:32:00.003-05:00

Uptown Kingston is a little less gloomy since new owners from Fleishmann's (if I and my husband remember right, their names are Al and Lydia) took over Burgevin's Florist. They bring a touch of the much-missed Well Seasoned Nest to the digs, with some home-furnishing type stuff and a less kitschy aesthetic. They also bring cats with them: Smokey, Cali, and Midnight. Having cats in store windows goes a long way to making a shopping district look lived-in. Uptown Kingston could use more store pets. At any rate, you are safe ordering your next bouquet from these folks, you'll get more than carnations and baby's breath.

Inauguration of Barack Obama as U.S. President

2009-01-20T10:09:00.004-05:00

From Online Etymology:

inauguration
1569, from Fr. inauguration "installation, consecration," from L. inaugurationem (nom. inauguratio) "consecration, installment under good omens," from inaugurare "take omens from the flight of birds, consecrate or install when such omens are favorable," from in- "on, in" + augurare "to act as an augur, predict" (see augur).

augur - c.1374 (implied in augury), from L. augur, a religious official in ancient Rome who foretold events by interpreting omens, perhaps originally meaning "an increase in crops enacted in ritual," in which case it probably is from Old L. *augos (gen. *augeris) "increase," and is related to augere "increase" (see augment). The more popular theory is that it is from L. avis "bird," since flights, singing, and feeding of birds or entrails from bird sacrifices were an important part of divination (cf. auspicious). The second element would be from garrire "to talk." The verb is 1549, from the noun.

Omens, predictions, consecration, increase, birds, flight, singing-talk-oratory, divination.

It really does feel like an inauguration day.

Girls and Monsters

2009-01-17T18:24:00.004-05:00

I've been paging through Lynda Barry's writhing, book-length doodle-for-your noodle, What It Is.

There's no section that isn't my favorite section. One of them is about monsters.

She says that the monster that most scared and fascinated her when she was a kid was the Gorgon, who could turn anyone who looked at her to stone. She reminded Barry of her mother, and working up the courage to look at the Gorgon helped her cope.

"We never need certain monsters more than when we are children," she writes. "And a furious woman with terrifying eyes and snakes for hair was the perfect monster for me...What was yours?"

A bunch come up.

The first one I thought of was a woman in a Twilight Zone episode I saw when I was five. We had just moved from Syracuse to Baltimore, and were living in an apartment while we waited for our house to be finished. I was sleeping in a room with my three sisters. I imagine the situation was somewhat stressful, but I remember very little from that period other than being traumatized by Rod Serling.

In that episode, called "The Eye of the Beholder," a beautiful woman, on a planet where the people most prized look like wild pigs, gets plastic surgery to make her more acceptable. She spends most of the episode wrapped like a mummy, which was scary in itself. When I think about that I stop breathing. If I remember right she screams at the end when they take off the gauze, because she's still pretty. I had lots of nightmares after that. I imagined a figure standing on the wall above my bed. Plastic surgery still makes me want to scream.

Most of us are shown The Wizard of Oz when we are too young to keep our eyes open during the Wicked Witch of the West parts. You have to grow into that part of the movie.

In my baby book, it says that Hansel and Gretel was my favorite fairy tale at age two, so I guess witches were on my mind from a young age. I always thought of Dorothy as the fourth witch in Oz (there's no witch of the south, a gap she fills when she drops out of the sky). There were other good witches in movies too, like the herbalist-healer in The Three Lives of Thomasina.

Then came Cruella DeVille. When I watched 101 Dalmatians with my kids several years ago, it seemed odd that I had ever been afraid of her, but I trembled whenever she came on screen. I couldn't believe Dalmatians was a movie for kids, with a villain that frightening.

Like Lynda Barry's Gorgon, Cruella DeVille reminded me of my mom when she was angry. They both had long nails and voices husky from smoking. (My mother later quit and her five kids grew up, making her life easier and more enjoyable, but her smoking was a big issue throughout my teens; particularly her habit of lighting up after dinner while we were trying to enjoy brownies she had baked us).

As I entered my teens I watched a fair number of Godzilla movies, usually with my brother. We liked to laugh at the dubbing. I wasn't afraid of Godzilla. I thought she was female, since she had a baby that seemed to have hatched from her egg, and maybe because boys called a girl at my high school Godzilla, as an insult. They stopped calling her Godzilla after she, in a Dalai-Lamaesque maneuver, hosted a formal-dress party at her house and invited the perpetrators.

Godzilla got me imagining what fun I'd have as a skyscraper-smashing giant. Godzilla also set the stage for the unquestionably-female monster of the Alien series, which, together with the hero played by Sigourney Weaver, was a touchstone throughout my 20s.

I agree with Lynda Barry that we need monsters, to help us be brave, to give us an outlet for our own monstrous feelings, to show us what's intolerant and uncivil in our world.

I wonder if the Other Mother of CORALINE will give my daughter something to brood about.

Children need monsters; do girls need female monsters?

I think so, and female heros to tussle with them.

More Lines on CORALINE: Boys' Emotions

2009-01-17T17:46:00.003-05:00

Last night I took my kids to see The Wizard of Oz on the big screen at Ulster Performing Arts Center. It was an experience like they'd never had at a movie. They'd seen it many times on video and DVD, of course, like any nine or 11-year-old. But here was a giant auditorium of people and images many times their height; people clapped for every actor, sang and chanted along. A father with his daughter on his lap sat in front of us; in front of them, three men leaned their heads on one another's shoulders.

Before the picture, my son and his friend (another unschooler) discussed CORALINE.

BOY 1: So how was CORALINE?

BOY 2: Sad. And scary. But mostly sad.

BOY 1: I almost never cry but sometimes I do. If I'm hurt. Or at a movie if someone is hurt.

ME: If you're injured?

BOY 2: He means if his feelings are hurt.

BOY 1: Yeah, if my feelings are hurt.

It was a privilege to listen in, and I wondered how many conversations between boys go into that territory. Maybe it happens all the time and goes largely unreported, or maybe it had to do with the kind of people these particular boys are.

I asked later what was so sad about CORALINE.

"When she goes to bed and makes dolls of her parents," my son said. "And when she puts all the dolls in the chest and locks it [in the other world.] I didn't like that at all."

Preview + Review of Long-Awaited CORALINE

2009-01-15T20:31:00.009-05:00

CORALINE is scheduled for release to theaters on February 6, 2009.

My son Ray has been making movies since he was six: stop motion animation, live action, and lately, CGI parodies of Star Wars. He reads film production books and bios of animators like Chuck Jones, and loves ‘making-of’ bonus features and little biopics about revered figures like Ray Harryhausen. One of his ‘mentors’ is Henry Selick, who has just completed his adaptation (for 3D stop-motion animation) of Neil Gaiman’s novel, Coraline.

It was our enormous good fortune—mine, my son’s, my daughter’s, my husband’s, and his mother’s—to visit the set of Coraline a couple of years ago, and a real treat to see a preview screening of the finished work the other night in Manhattan, with Henry Selick on hand to answer audience questions.

Ray, who is 11, wasn’t sure he wanted to see what he called a ‘horror’ movie. His 9-year-old sister, who acts in most of his movies and in her own monologue-driven shorts, was firm: she wouldn’t go to the screening. The monstrous Other Mother of the previews, and the prospect of having her lunge from the screen, were horrors they could live without.

So, Ray and I headed into NYC with the plan that he would shut his eyes, pull his jacket up over his face, and hold his hands to his ears if it all got to be too much. He was willing to endure, if only for the Q&A portion of the evening.

As it turns out, he didn’t have to worry too much. He only shut his eyes once, and not for long. While the idea of Coraline is truly terrifying—a girl is left alone to rescue her supernaturally abducted parents—its creators have allowed the idea to carry most of the weight of emotion, as with the best fairy tales, and haven’t piled onto it with 3D shock effects or long, anxiety-provoking suspense sequences. The Nightmare Before Christmas, with its cast of characters in varying states of decomposition, is more horrific—at least to me, and I think my son, who got to an age where he felt too uneasy to watch it, and wouldn’t go near the undead-dominated Corpse Bride, would agree.

Henry Selick has done a beautiful job of reconceptualizing the novel for the screen and for stop motion. From the first moments, when metal hands sew up a doll-sized version of the title character and cast her into a void, this is a movie that invites contemplation of the animator and the animator’s art. Our first view of the hands of the evil Other Mother, creator and destroyer of the Other World, are bare of fleshly trappings, primordial armature. We come to find that the energy of children is what makes the Other Mother’s material other world, and it is their life force that makes it beautiful, whimsical, and inviting.

If you have watched any of the featurettes about Coraline, you have seen artist after artist toiling and tinkering away, as artists always do on these projects, though now, with the Internet, in less obscurity. They can even blog about their work for Laika Studios. It’s hard to watch that image of armature hands making the Coraline doll and not think of all the human hands that have gone into the making of this supremely hand-made movie, and seeing in these moments a tribute to them all (certainly they deserve a tribute, including those several dozen Laika workers, I was sorry to read, who were recently laid off).

OtherMotherWorld is especially fanciful and so packed with detail it's hard to imagine not seeing the movie many times to try to take it all in. Henry S. has ensured that the Other Mother’s overture to Coraline is suitably seductive. She—and we—are truly tempted to stay and sample more delights from the animators’ cabinet of wonders. The wonders really are wonderful; we laughed throughout the early other world scenes. In the post-screening Q&A, Henry S. talked a bit about his motivation for shooting in 3D. He wanted the audience to have more access to the animators' world—2D doesn't really allow it. So the other world—more colorful, more fanciful—really is the animators' world. (One could imagine a version that is flat when we're in Coraline's world and 3D only in the other world, like the sepia vs. color worlds of The Wizard of Oz.)

Henry Selick’s Other Mother is a kind of ‘50s fantasy mom—she cooks brilliantly in heels, make-up, and manicure and wears a stainless, starched apron. Other Father is affable, doting, and fun (aside from the saucy, riotous French and Saunders as the Misses Spink and Forcible, my favorite vocal performance is John Hodgman's as the Fathers Real and Other).

Coraline's real world parents, by contrast, are familiar to us as contemporary, overworked telecommuters (fortunate in that sense, they write at home on gardening) who share the work of their life equally, don’t exactly excel in the kitchen, and don’t have much time for their daughter, who learns what it means to have 'good enough' parents.

That Coraline's creativity will rival the Other Mother's is intimated by a lovely scene that is not in Neil Gaiman’s book. Having returned from an early foray into the other world, Coraline finds her apartment empty; her parents have not come home from work and grocery shopping. Newly arrived in a strange place, friendless and now abandoned by her parents, she goes to bed alone, making pillow-people versions of her mom and dad to comfort herself—the Other Mother isn't the only one who can conjure power from a doll. I think Coraline's realization that they're not coming back is the scariest moment in the story (though Gaiman's protagonist is pretty brave at this point, as I recall). Henry S. wisely lingers long enough for us to feel her loneliness and her sadness.

A resourceful adventurer who is, like too few movie protagonists—even at the dawn of the 21st century—a girl, Coraline would be perfect if not for Henry S.’s addition of a boy to come to her aid in her time of need. Or so I thought when I heard about him. But Wybie (nicknamed "Why Be Born" by Coraline—I guess Henry S. knew some of us would resist), who gives Coraline someone other than a (really cool) cat to dialog with, adds a melancholy element to the other world, where he is more expressive for his muteness.

When my son and I came back up the Hudson River the day after the screening, and made our report to his sister, she said, “I think I’ve changed my mind. I do want to see Coraline.” I look forward to seeing it again with her.

We were too shy to ask for a shot of Henry S. with Ray, but here he is after the Q&A. Be sure to view through your 3D glasses.

The Age of Innocence at 32 and 47

2009-01-15T10:13:00.008-05:00

When The Age of Innocence came out in 1993, I was 32. I went to see it with my boyfriend. We were living together in a committed relationship, and our lives had become routinized and boring.

After the movie we strolled into the East Village and he began yammering in an easy, superficial way, much like the way May Welland tells Newland Archer all the society doings in her winter resort of St. Augustine. Like Newland Archer I tuned out my partner in order to pursue my own reverie about, actually, Newland Archer, in whom I thought I saw myself.

I had left the film sad at his fate, and his separation from his soulmate, Ellen Olenska. I was on a cliff I might soon fall off of, into marriage and a lifetime of predictability. My partner’s wisecracks about Michelle Pfeiffer’s hairdo, or whatever he was talking about, added annoyance to my despair. He wasn't moved by the story the way I had been, and I took it as one of many signs that we didn't belong together. Within a year we had broken up and gone our separate ways.

In my eleventh year as a New York resident, I moved into my own apartment in Chelsea, where I lived happily, without a roommate for the first time. I bought a VHS copy of The Age of Innocence and made a habit of watching it once a year.

I like to see it during the winter holidays, not so much because it is a winter film (like Meet Me in St. Louis, it encompasses all seasons, but like that movie it leaves you with a sense of having been snowed on), but because of a particular memory I have of its being shot in Park Slope, around the corner from where I lived with that boyfriend.

One summer evening I came home from work to find a block of Eighth Avenue closed to auto traffic. Blowers were creating an artificial snowfall so that Ellen Olenska, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, could descend the steps of a brownstone, enter a carriage, and drive away. (I later realized this scene must have taken place after she says goodbye to Newland Archer, played by Daniel Day Lewis, for the last time, closing the door on the possibility of their ever having the affair they’ve been contemplating).

Passersby dressed in shirtsleeves or shorts and flip-flops, had gathered to watch Ms. Pfeiffer mount the carriage and depart in the blizzard, and I stood with them for a while, enchanted by the giant snow globe Martin Scorcese had created in our neighborhood. When the movie came out, this made me more excited about seeing it, this tiny role I’d already played as a spectator of its creation.

It was wrenching, this meditation on sacrifice and lost possibility. Newland and Ellen represented all the things people give up when they settle down. Newland's story was a warning about how commitment undermines creative freedom and atrophies intellect and authenticity. Marriage even seemed to ruin his appreciation for art and literature.

Even after a few more years had passed, and I was happily married to someone I regarded as a creative soulmate, and had two children, and a family life full of art projects, and experiences worth making art about, I watched The Age of Innocence with this focus on loss, summed up in the tenor of a scene at the end, an exchange between Newland and his son Ted. Ted reveals that May, on her deathbed, told him about Newland’s affair with Ellen Olenska. And that his mother had said that she would die knowing that Ted and her other children would always be safe with Newland, because “once, when she asked him to, he gave up the one thing he wanted most.” In answer, Newland looks ahead and says bitterly, “she never asked. She never asked.”

His choice of whom to marry, in a society which, he tells Ellen earlier in the film, does not arrange its marriages, had been determined by power brokers in a system of invisible signs and symbols that moved in mysterious ways, with curious and sometimes surprising endorsements.

(Julius Beaufort, for example, who winds up as Ted’s father-in-law, is able to conduct a series of scandalous affairs and even survives a Madoff-like collapse of his investment business, all because he surfs the changing times better than Newland).

This past New Year’s Eve, 15 years after my first viewing from a bachelorette’s vantage point, I decided to watch The Age of Innocence again. I had missed a few years of viewing, and I wondered if I’d see anything new in it. Right from the beginning, I noticed more details about Scorsese’s adaptation of the novel, how he used cinematic means to literary ends so brilliantly. But a new emotional response surprised me.

This time around, I was drawn to a different most-significant moment. Ted has arranged a visit to Ellen Olenska in Paris and sprung it on his dad, asking whether he might like to meet again the woman he almost “threw it all over for.” Newland, alone in the Louvre (throughout the film, the contemplation of art brings this character closest to his emotional truth), thinks to himself, “I’m only 57.” He meets Ted outside Ellen’s apartment, but can’t bring himself to visit her.

“Just tell her I’m old-fashioned,” is the excuse he gives his son, “that should be enough.” He then walks away, and the narrator (Joanne Woodward) tells us that the fact that his wife had appreciated his sacrifice, and pitied him, moves him inexpressibly. Yielding to May's subtly-expressed deathbed wish that he stay committed to her beyond death, he walks away.

“Just tell her I’m old-fashioned.” With this remark Newland sides with May and the old order. Her comment to Ted about the family’s safety has ensured that his commitment to her will never end; propriety has spoken through her and he will listen.

Ellen is indeed only one of a series of ghosts in his life, one of a number of people, places, actions given up in order to experience commitment. Newland’s way is a fundamentally conservative one, and though Beaufort, with his philandering, and Ellen, with her “eccentric and incoherent education” and possible divorce, represent a new, chaotic, even dangerous order, Newland’s choice, which he finally recognizes as a choice, and stands by it, is in favor of stability and tradition. Not to say that the path he picked was better than if he'd chosen Ellen, or lived like Julius, but I no longer see it as quite so miserable and suffocating. People who commit give up all kinds of transitory pleasures; people who don't commit give up the possibility of ever standing in the room where 'all the great events of their life' have taken place.

In Newland Archer, Edith Wharton wrote an expansive character that allows for identification from very different vantage points—Archer’s yearning for freedom versus the decision to forgo it. Is Newland disgusted with Julius Beaufort or envious of him? Is his marriage to May the result of societal coercion or choice? Either, or both, depending on who's watching, and when.

Cranberry Sauce Flotilla

2008-12-18T19:31:00.003-05:00

Cranberry Sauce Flotilla is a song by Dog On Fleas that I sing whenever I'm around cranberries.

What I really want to talk about is how I make cranberry sauce. If I say so myself, this recipe is yum, and I made it up myself. Don't know why I made it rhyme, though.

Cranberry Sauce a la Red Eft

8 oz or so of cranberries
1/4 c or so maple syrup (grade b!)
apple or apricot juice
2 tbsp or so agar agar or kanten flakies

Put those crans
in a saucepan.
Cover with water, bring them to simmer.
Start to look forward to an excellent dinner.
Let them cook until they look soft and stuff.
Add some juice. Not too much. Do this part off the cuff.
Maple syrup at this point will make it sweeter.
Just stir some in, you don't need a beater.
Add agar agar or kanten to make it firm up.
Pour into a bowl, or for each diner, a cup.
Refrigerate. Let it set a spell.
This will allow your sauce to gel.

Eat while singing Cranberry Sauce Flotilla. Good on toast, with yogurt, or mixed with rice and bright orange squash like kabocha or butternut.

Out of My Way Or I'll Eat You!

2008-12-02T11:02:00.006-05:00

The Sinterklass Revels (scroll down for my first post about this) got underway this weekend, and I roared with great joy as the dragon pitted against St. George.

Bellow, growl, threaten to eat everyone around you! It's therapeutic. I recommended it to my sister in California. She emailed back, "I wish I could roar but houses here are so close together that even my unattached next door neighbors would hear me!"

So inhibited are we from unleashing the dragon that we can't even do it in the privacy of our own homes.

A few years ago I took Alan Arkin's excellent improv workshop at the Omega Institute, and on the last day the students designed our own improvs. I was drafted by a woman (who typically worked as a clown in her home city) to be in her improv. I would sit in the dark by a campfire, and she, a monster, would crash through the woods, grab me, carry me off. It was great fun screaming, but my pleasure was nothing like hers. Afterwards, she told me with tears in her eyes how profoundly it had benefited her to be the monster.

Now I know what she meant. Be the monster!

After St. George slays me, I am revived by The Fool and transform back into myself, but different, lighter. More Sinterklaas pageantry this Saturday, December 6, 2008 in Rhinebeck, New York.

What Do I Do With Quinoa Flakes?

2008-11-26T09:23:00.005-05:00

I'm so glad you asked!

Last year I posted this great recipe for Amish Baked Oatmeal, after we were served it at the wonderful Catamount's Bed & Breakfast in Williston, Vermont.

I've been dickering with that recipe ever since to vary it, make it more healthy, etc. Here's the quinoa flake version, with suggestions for additions. Play with it, you can't go wrong.

Baked Quinoa (because Amish Baked Quinoa sounds odd)

3 cups quinoa flakes
1 cup maple syrup (a little less may do the trick. Grade B is best!)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 scant teaspoon salt
2 beaten eggs
3/4 C coconut oil
1/2-3/4 cup milk (I use almond milk, goat yogurt, soy milk...)

Mix together and put in ramekins or baking dish. 30 minutes at 350 degrees F.
We halve this recipe to serve 4. More eggs makes it moister. The batter should be like thick pancake batter.

The quinoa becomes like flour.

Optional additions: a banana, cut up in little chunks.
Dried fruits (make it wetter).
1/4 Cup of hemp seeds.
1/4 Cup of amaranth.
Spices like cinnamon and cardamom.
For oil, other options are grapeseed oil, ghee, and olive oil.

This recipe works great with millet, rice, buckwheat (the flaky kind), it's a great way to add different grains to your diet, and it's the perfect basis for experimentation. Enjoy!

Wind Chimes for the iPhone

2008-11-26T08:37:00.002-05:00

"Rest," the breezes say,
"Set your being to chime time."
Soft! —The iPhone sways.

My beloved, good buddy, finder, dadu of my children,

Henry Lowengard,

has created a new iApp for the iPhone, so iPlease iGo iBuy Wind Chimes for the iPhone!

Find it in the iStore by searching "iPhone Henry Lowengard."

Enjoy peaceful, dulcet tones as if you were in a balmy place while helping pay our mortgage and supporting good causes we donate to whether we can afford to or not.

The iPhone Wind Chimes app soothes with tinkling tones and visual vibes. Shake it, suspend it, or set it on automatic. Choose from several sounds, images, and backgrounds. Mix and match or use presets. No wind? No problem!

Sinterklass Celebration Coming to Rhinebeck

2008-11-26T07:52:00.007-05:00

Imagine an olde tyme holiday, with pageants, mummers, puppets, a giant pop-up book lit from within, Sinterklass arriving by boat, and you begin to have an idea what the towns of Rhinecliff and Rhinebeck have up their sleeves in December. Among the more traditional European pieces of what promises to be a multiculti fest of lights, there will be a short performance of St. George and the Dragon. I play the Dragon (roaring is incredible fun). The public performances are being orchestrated by Jeanne Fleming (goddess-mind behind New York City's Halloween Parade and many other public spectacles).

We have been rehearsing in the former Bing's restaurant in the center of Rhinebeck, now Sinterklass Headquarters, and each night, the large windows of this beautiful building are lit up with the giant puppets being crafted within.

The December events will kick off this Saturday, December 6, 4pm at the dock in Rhinecliff.

About the Sinterklass Festival (Re-posted—Read more at SinterklassRhinebeck.com):

All Hail Sinterklaas!

by Cynthia Own Philip

Sinterklaas is coming to town! Yes, Virginia, he really is. Only he is going to be an even more expansive character than the one you have come to know–a bringer of light, love, generosity, warmth–the good king, the guardian of children.

Some of you may remember the magical Dutch Christmas celebrations with which our own celebration artist Jeanne Fleming filled the village of Rhinebeck's streets for seven years in the 1980s. Their pageantry turned girls and boys into
monarchs for the day. They wore crowns and carried scepters they had created themselves and grown-ups paid courtly deference to them.

The same will be true of the new Sinterklaas festival, set for Saturday, December 6th. The difference is that the celebration will reach back in time far beyond the Dutch tradition to the roots every human being has devised to make tangible the
mantra "Let there be light." Thus the Sinterklaas celebration will be secular, ecumenical and diverse, including Christians, Jews and nature lovers along with our growing Mexican population. The original Native American culture will be featured, too. The aim of Sinterklaas is to strengthen and refresh Rhinebeck's sense of community as well as its very long history reaching back to its earliest Dutch roots.

What is grand about the vision is that it offers opportunities for everyone to
participate—banjo players, singers, actors, yarn spinners, painters, dancers, and puppeteers to name only a few, for the range of performers in our neighborhood is astonishingly wide and deep.

One Festival, Many Events

Six weeks before December 6, internationally known puppeteers Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles - they fabricate the giant puppets for New York City's Halloween
Parade and are based in Red Hook - will begin workshops for groups of friends, teens, families, schools and local organizations. They will be at work every day in Bings if you want to drop in a help for a couple of hours.

On November 29 at 6 pm, St. Nicholas, so beloved by the Dutch will arrive in a sloop at the Rhinecliff Landing a week before the festival. For three nights he will ride through Rhinebeck neighborhoods. His white horse will seek out the traditional "carrot in a shoe" the children have left for him. He will be accompanied by the Grumpus, his prankster sidekick who will leave candy on the doorsteps of those that do and a St. George and the Dragon play created by Peter Muste. This play and others created by the Center for the Performing Arts will be performed at the workshop on weekends and on the Festival Day itself.

Prelude over, the eagerly anticipated day of celebration will at last arrive. With all the vents planned, the town will have become an enchanted place. Hundreds of children will make their crowns and branches-scepters at a workshop at the Dutch Reformed Church. They will attach three wishes to their branches - one for their families, one for their town and one for the world. Throughout the day performances in Town Hall, the churches, the Beekman Arms and the shops will present the varied solstice traditions from around the world. Singers, dancers, musicians, the Abbots Bromley Deer Dance, a stilt band and fire jugglers will fill the streets. The culminating event of the day will be a Children’s Starlight Parade.

While the children adorn themselves with their crowns and their branches, grown-ups will carry large illuminated stars - hundreds of them. (These can be purchased ahead of time in support of the Whalewatch along with traditional Chocolate Letters). In the grand finale, the adults, bearing their Stars, will bow down to the children, honoring them as the town’s future–and for a brief moment holding the stars at the child’s waist level, will position the children in a filed of stars. Then, as they again stand, they will raise the stars above their heads, placing them and the entire community in its proper place in the firmament. In that one moment the entire community will come together under the stars. Afterwards, they may take their beautiful stars home as a reminder of the communal celebration. But they must not forget to bring them back for Sinterklaas 2009 when still more stars will be be added to the galaxy.

Festivals of light are an ancient and global way to bring communities together and Rhinebeck’s Sinterklaas is an exercise in modern mythmaking, as a new story for our town is created based on deep tradition and history. Be sure to mark Rhinebeck's unique Sinterklaas on your must do calendar!

The Youth Vote

2008-11-05T10:07:00.003-05:00

The polls were packed with kids this year, it seems. There were lots of news stories about kids going to vote with their parents, whether their parents were the Obamas or people like us.

My son and daughter think the voting age should be lowered. My son thinks one should be able to vote after age 12. My daughter feels that a 20-year-old should be able to run for president. After this election, it feels certain that younger people will have more say in American politics.

Living in a peaceful world, protecting the environment and endangered animals, treating domestic animals well, and having enough money and work that isn't boring are the issues my children bring up most.

The atmosphere last night was electric with people power. We Americans did something transformative together yesterday, and we go forward knowing that we have a chance of making positive change with a president who cares what we think and what we have to give. Our biggest problem has been not having a way to channel the considerable energy for the public good and native ability to innovate that our citizenry possesses. Let's hope that's the real change that's coming.

C-itizen participation
H-ealthcare for all
A-ction for the earth
N-onviolence
G-overnment for all
E-quality

Change we can believe in.

Farm Animals for Obama

2008-11-04T15:04:00.004-05:00

People are voting early this year, and you have to congratulate the American populace for being hip to possible fraud in the system this time out.

It's a good day for an election. May the best candidate win!

The Halloween Journey

2008-10-30T09:58:00.004-04:00

Of all the Halloween activities out there, none have appealed to me and my family as much as The Halloween Journey, produced in the Catskill Mountains by Kids in the Kaatskills.

"For parents who don't like Halloween's emphasis on sugar and fear, Kids in the Kaatskill's Halloween Journey offers an alternative that brings children a sense of magic and enchantment. A celebration of Celtic traditions of the season, as well as the Catskill region, children of all ages and adults are guided on a quest to find light in the dark woods. Along the way, they meet characters such as Rip Van Winkle, Johnny Appleseed, the Maple Tree Nymph, and John Burroughs, as well as fairies, animal spirits, and other forest creatures, who share tales and treasures."

The wholesome treasures (an apple, fairy dust, a mala-bead bracelet) and the folk tales are enchanting, but it is the setting of the event, and the way it appeals to the senses, that I know my children will revisit every Halloween as they get older: the bonfire sending spark threads up into the night, reconnecting with friends we haven't seen in ages, a starry sky with a frosty Milky Way that we can't see from our own light-polluted back yard, carved pumpkins and luminaria guiding the way into the woods, candlelight reflected in a still stream as we pick our way carefully over a ramshackle footbridge, green light reflecting off the mohair shawl of the Wise Woman of the Forest.

One year, while on the journey, we even saw the Aurora Borealis—talk about fulfilling a quest to find the light!

To get on the mailing list for next year's Halloween Journey (assuming there will be one; some years there hasn't been) contact storydanz at yahoo dot com. Kids in the Kaatskills is a Not-for-Profit Organization based in Margaretville, NY that coordinates events for children of the Catskill region.

MEDICAL SUPPORT FOR THE UNINSURED: A PANEL DISCUSSION

2008-10-23T17:34:00.001-04:00

Tuesday, October 28, 2008, 7:30 pm
Unitarian Universalist Congregation
320 Sawkill Road, Kingston

PANELISTS:

Dr. Maya Hambright, Staff Physician at the Ellenville Family Practice.

Ms. Verna Little, PsyD,LCSW-R,SAT., Vice President for Psychosocial Services and Community Affairs at the Institute for Family Health.

Ms. JoAnn Mundhenk, Principle Welfare Examiner at the Ulster County Department of Social Services.

Moderator: Mark Howenstein, Ph.D., Professorof Law and Society, Ramapo College

How Can They Still Exist?!?

2008-10-13T08:11:00.001-04:00

Pleased to be in

Night of the Living Bush Supporters

...view and pass it on...

Changeschooling

2008-09-09T01:39:00.006-04:00

Fall, in our family, is truly the dying season. Seems like most of the deaths in our family have happened this time of year. Dreams, rain, red and yellow leaves, sun, brown and dry leaves, that musk in the air, a change, a release.

No one but my grandmother had died when I became a mother for the first time. Then, in short order, my Dad announced he had lymphoma, my uncle died, my brother-in-law committed suicide, a friend and creative partner of my husband's committed suicide, and my father-in-law died, and somewhere in the middle of that, September 11 brought a different awareness of vulnerability and the reality of loss to everyone around us and into the fabric of our culture.

My dad made it through his lymphoma, bless his multiply-bypassed heart. He has survived quite a lot. I love him.

My children were born into a very different death environment, I guess you could say, than I was. When I was a kid, it seemed like nobody died. Not anyone that made a big impression on me until my cousin died in a car accident the year I went to college. Until that time I was a stranger to funerals, and my family of origin still seems to avoid them—putting them off and organizing memorials a year after the family member has died. People are always too busy to travel right after a death, it seems.

It's been different for my kids. From babyhood, they have been going to funerals and memorials for family members and friends. They know that these are not dreary, black-draped events (well, not for the most part), but can be joyous celebrations of lives full of gifts.

A couple of weeks ago we attended the funeral of a woman in our congregation who had been a good buddy to my son. She was a bohemian, someone who, her friends said, exemplified the spirit of the town—Woodstock—where she made her home (sometimes in a car or tent). She was also too restless ever to sit through a service, and one thing she did during that time was to talk to my son. He taught her origami, they chatted... At her service, I was proud to see him raise his hand when our minister asked if anyone would like to share memories. When his turn came, the two of us went to the podium together. He shared three simple memories, which I can't remember except for the last one. He said that he noticed she wore glasses for reading, which he figured meant she had spent a lot of her time outside, looking toward the horizon (which would make her far-sighted, if you follow the reasoning).

As person after person got up and told stories, most of them about how her free spirit had challenged their assumptions about the right way to live, some to the point of being frustrated with her or feeling they had to distance themselves from her, I watched my son's face. I was glad people close to her talked about how much they struggled in their relations with her. He paid close attention, and at times he wiped his eyes.

Earlier this summer, at a service to finally scatter the ashes of my husband's friend mentioned above, my children released paper boats full of ashes onto a stream while the rest of us sat in the woods, ringing bells. Then we all went to dine in an outdoor garden, surrounded by trees.

As we grow and spiral around the question of death, we appreciate this passage differently each time. One of the best gifts I can give my children is to invite them to be part of all our families' and friends' rites and conversations about death, to allow them to see the impermanence of this project of life my husband and I signed them up for without asking them first (or perhaps we did, tacitly, and perhaps they said yes despite the implications), to know that change is home.

Changeschooling? Maybe that's what it comes down to. Taking time to feel the changes. What our way of life asks of me and my husband, first and foremost, is that we guard our children's solitude, their time to process experience, which is so hard if your Hockey Mom & Dad are hurtling you from hockey to bowling alley birthday party to Walmart to homework to bed.

Tomorrow we go to Brooklyn for the funeral of Monte Ghertler, father of our dear friend Louise. He died September 7, peacefully, in hospice care at his home, with his family, his books, and his cat. My children will be there with me, my husband and our friends for that celebration, to experience what life is all about.

SrutiBox...for the iPhone

2008-08-25T19:04:00.005-04:00

My best friend and counterpart is launching a new business of apps for the iPhone with an iPhone SrutiBox (say shrootee bocks).

It makes a droning sound reminiscent of the Indian harmonium, and you can tune an instrument to it. I know, you've GOT to have it, right? Here's the link to the SrutiBox page in the iPhone store.

From the application description:

SrutiBox simulates an Indian harmonium, used as a base tone in Indian music and in spiritual practices of chanting and droning.

This simulation uses 12 'reeds' which can be tuned to a number of scales, randomly detuned, and chorused. The volume of each 'reed' can be set, making for a wide variety of drones. The reeds can be set to one of six timbres, each with more harmonic content.

A special iPhone feature of SrutiBox is that you can wave the phone in an imitation of pumping the bellows, adding a touch of realism to the simulation.

SrutiBox can also be used as a pitch source for instrument tuning purposes, or as an aid for learning the difference between Just and Equal Tempered intervals.

As with other iPhone/iPod touch audio applications, it'll sound better through headphones, although in a quiet room, it's quite effective! Make sure to use the volume controls on the side of the phone to set the volume level you like.

And here's what it looks like on your phone, with fun sliders to adjust and so forth. Electronic music geeks, take note, please buy one, and tell a friend.

Unschooling: Pretend Play

2008-08-19T15:01:00.012-04:00

Unschoolers will tell you that pretend play is one of the foundations of a free education (spiritually free and financially free, actually), and surely one of my favorite things about the life is listening to my 9-year-old daughter pretend. She just spent a half-hour on my old cell phone (batteries removed), talking to a series of fictional characters in Millerton about how to get to Harney Tea Shop. As she spoke to them ("No, I just need directions...that's right...well can you tell me how to get there?...and from there to West Cornwall?"), she consulted a map of Eastern New York and Northwest Connecticut that we picked up on our last trip over there (favorite new tea: Citron Green).

This is the first time I recall her having a pretend phone conversation, at least of this length. It reminds me of the great piece by Adam Gopnik about his daughter's imaginary friend, Charlie Ravioli, whom she can only try to contact by phone, and who is never available to speak with her (available only as an abstract online).

The differences are interesting: the inventor of Charlie Ravioli was four, whereas my daughter is nine, an age at which most schooled kids have stopped engaging in pretend play (until we're adults and enter work-world training programs that rely on make-believe scenarios). Charlie Ravioli, the imaginary playmate, is the busy one, whereas my daughter is planning her own adventure with imaginary aides. Gopnik asks what his daughter's choice of imaginary playmate says about the pace and style of life in New York, but when I first read the essay, it left me wondering, "So what are you going to do about it?" The pace of contemporary life is by no means outside our control. Gopnik's daughter is now 10...I wonder what her imaginary life is like now. I hope it hasn't been supplanted by summer camp, after school programs, sports, and all the rest of what makes it impossible for overscheduled kids' imaginary friends to reach them.

The Law of Zoning and Planning

2008-08-05T22:53:00.004-04:00

One night a couple of years ago, I and my family were rambling around our neighborhood one evening when we came across what appeared to be a couple of hefty law books. My children insisted on lugging them home.

Occasionally I would come upon one of them reading one of these books.

Over time, it was discovered that these books were the ideal cure for insomnia.

My daughter would say, "I need to hear The Law of Zoning and Planning tonight."

So be it.

And truly, can you imagine a sleeping pill working faster than this?

As the petitioner correctly argues, the traffic problems which may or may not be presented by her proposed commercial development of the property are properly considered in the administrative process which the city has itself established...Generalized fears of an increase in traffic are wholly inappropriate, however, to deny any one landowner the rights to which he is entitled.

Et cetera.

Not that zoning and planning aren't vitally important. Fortunately for us all, the principles that govern them are no doubt soaking into my daughter's unconscious whenever she falls asleep hearing about easements, covenants, and variances.

Sometimes we find solutions in unlikely places.

Hudson Valley-Based Business

2008-08-04T20:04:00.002-04:00

My friend Ellen, who lives across the Hudson River from me, has started an internet business of organic cosmetics and gifts,
Body and Home Organics. Lovely.

Divided Attention

2008-08-04T07:36:00.006-04:00

My daughter and I took a workshop on Saturday in Kiyana, a spiritual system of athletics and contemplation with roots in ancient Persia and the teachings of Rumi.

From the website of the teacher, Javad Tehranian:

“Kiyana” means the origin, applies to the vital movements that are the source of all corporeal movements and athletic exercises which appeared in ancient Persia and were called “Yega” (the derivative of the farsi word “Yeganegi” which means unity) in a sense of unity of body, mind and spirit; recently it has been called “Kiyana”, the portion of these movements from ancient Persia that went to far east was called “Yoga” and what arrived to Persia a portion of it was selected and is called “Varzish baastaani” (ancient athletic).

The movements are done to music in a circle, and are done in sequences that students rotate as they pick new ones up, using divided attention. I found it very challenging to move in the circle according to one pattern while trying to learn the next one mentally, only doing it when I was ready.

Speaking of divided attention, I was making sure my daughter was okay when she left the circle now and then to lie on the floor and watch. One achilles heel hurt, and my right big toe seemed to be growing a blister from the rubbing against the wood floor, though I'm happy to say that never came to fruition.

Many of the movements had a calisthenic quality akin to push-ups or deep knee bends. Though the workshop went for two days, I'd had plenty workout after one three-hour session, and I'm glad we didn't sign up for both days. I would love to try it again, especially if increasing familiarity leads to an ability to rotate more movement patterns and feel less confusion.

We did try whirling (sema). I'm happy I was game for that. After childbirth I experienced some periods of extreme dizziness, and now when my husband and I take the kids on rides at fairs, we have to be careful to pick ones that won't make our heads spin like dredels. My husband literally turned green once on a ride called the Pumpkin Patch...so I was worried I would get dizzy and fall.

But I found that if I looked at the floor right by my feet, I would regain balance quickly enough after whirling. The dance elevates the dancer to a state of joy, but only with practice would I be able to enter into it without my attention divided by worries about my performance. I watched my daughter come and go from the circle, unconcerned with whether she could follow the steps or not. When she couldn't do them, she simply walked in the circle, watching everyone else. It was a quality of attention that would have helped me, if I could have done it.

By whirling one could imagine banishing the concerns of the ego through sheer centrifugal force, if the ego weren't so good at slithering into every turn of thought. Learning three sets of movements and watching a fourth, hoping to absorb it, one imagines that there is no more room left in the mind for anything else, yet there are still gaps where shame, inadequacy, impatience and the rest can snake in.

From the Mevlana (Rumi) family website:

From a scientific viewpoint we witness that contemporary science definitely confirms that the fundamental condition of our existence is to revolve. There is no object, no being which does not revolve and the shared similarity among beings is the revolution of the electrons, protons and neutrons in the atoms, which constitute the structure of each of them. As a consequence of this similarity, everything revolves and man carries on his life, his very existence by means of the revolution in the atoms, structural stones of his body, by the revolution of his blood, by his coming from the earth and return to it, by his revolving with earth itself.

PS: Are there women dervishes?

.

Thought for the Day

2008-07-17T10:09:00.001-04:00

Another from my husband:

"Ray doesn't read books—he reads shelves."

Unschooling Thought for the Day

2008-07-14T12:18:00.002-04:00

From my husband:

"Unschooling is like a school where the only subject is reading."

Certainly this summer, that is true. When they're not swimming, out and about with us, or playing with friends, my kids are in the hammock or on the couch reading big, fat books they keep in stacks on the floor next to beds, on tables, in bags brought home from the library. Hooray for having the time to read.

ASK Reads - A Short Story Lover's Delight

2008-07-10T06:46:00.004-04:00

I'm participating in this short story evening as a reader. This is the press release.

Arts Society of Kingston - ASK
97 Broadway in Kingston
July 17, 7-9pm
suggested donation: $5

What's life without stories? With this question in mind the Arts Society of Kingston presents ASK Reads; a program of short stories by local and international authors read by ASK's talented performers. On Thursday July 17, from 7- 9pm we will offer four short stories:

Our first story is a dark comedy which flies in the face of the notion that the creative life is "so romantic" as it exposes the relationship between a neurotic writer and his once muse - now wife. It will be read by the talented actor, writer and lyricist Gerrit Graham. Gerrit is known for his many roles in movies like Brian DePalma's "Greetings", and Robert Zemeckis' Used Cars; films in which he starred alongside Robert DeNiro and Kurt Russell respectively. He has also appeared on such television programs as Star Trek: Voyager , Law and Order and Seinfeld to mention only a few.

Next, we'll offer a touching and funny tale about a loving Jewish mother ( who happens to be an athiest ), her son the night club performer ( who could use a more religious mother right about now ) and God. This story, "God on Friday Night," by Irwin Shaw, will be read for us by Nancy Graham. Nancy is a writer and actor who, most recently, has appeared in the Cocoon Theatre's production of The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekov. Another in a long line of talented people who call the Hudson Valley home, she is a resident of up-town Kingston where she lives with her family.

Then comes "Michael's Music" by Paul Cooper. One of ASK's talented member writers- as well as a talented actor- Paul's accomplishments include membership in the famed B.M.I Writer's Workshop under Lehman Engel. He also is the founder of the Hudson Valley Gilbert and Sullivan Music Theatre, and is the author of "Tales of Aunt Ida" published by ReallyReuben Publishing. His newest volume, "Six Modern Midrashim", is soon to be published. "Michael's Music" is a charming fantasy about a young boy who brings the music in his head to life - without the use of voice or instruments! The reaction of his audience is - to say the least - mixed.

And lastly, "Bistro Ouest" by Sidney Norinsky. Sid is another of ASK's splendid member writers who's work includes not only short stories, but also novels and - especially dear to his heart - plays. Sid's theatrical works have been performed at ASK's Tuesday night Playwrite's Lab, and we are fortunate that he has now contributed this short story for our evening of readings. 'Bistro Ouest' concernes a recently divorced man who - by what appears an almost magical coincidence - stumbles upon a group of like-minded characters in a newly opened French restaurant (Bistro Ouest). They appear to offer a kind of social cure to his troubled life. But who are these characters? And do they realy offer a cure?

'Bistro Ouest' will be read by Phillip Levine, the host of Colony Cafe's popular Open Mic Poetry. A skilled dancer, and a poet himself, Phillip is also an actor with extensive experience performing with local theater companies in a variety of productions from 'King Lear' to 'The Fantasticks'. He also has television and movie credits, having appeared in such varied productions as 'The American Revolution' for The History Channel wherein he portrayed Gen. Henry Clinton. And roles in such movies as 'Fear of Clowns 2', among many others.

On Dreams

2008-06-29T09:50:00.001-04:00

"A dream cuts and pastes your hopes and wishes so that you will be accustomed to them."

—AJ, about to turn 9

Father's Day Opus 40

2008-06-27T10:25:00.008-04:00

A favorite Father's Day place: Opus 40, Saugerties, New York.

What is Opus 40?

"One of the largest and most beguiling works of art on the entire continent."
—Brendan Gill, Architectural Digest

The work is an immense composition of finely fitted stone, rising in ramps and swirling terraces around pools and trees and fountains out of the rock bed of an abandoned bluestone quarry. It spreads out over more than six acres.

It is the product of more thirty-seven years of a man's life. His name was Harvey Fite. He worked alone, using his hands and traditional quarryman's tools, to build his masterpiece.

You can also learn more by reading Tad's Opus 40 Blog, linked from the Hudson Valley Blogroll to the left of your screen.

When I am at Opus 40 I feel as if I am wandering in a dream, a dream landscape. I like to draw the shapes,

or sit and imagine placing and fitting the stones one by one.

My husband likes to draw or take photographs, like this one of our children shooting a movie called The Maze.

According to my daughter, The Maze is about a girl in a maze who meets a heart and a Tiepitum, which is a monster with many eyes.

Once we went to Opus 40 after a wedding had taken place there. There were leftover peonies and ferns in glass bowls waiting to be cleared away, and my daughter and I made fairy houses out of them among the rocks.

I like the title of Twyla Tharp's book, The Creative Habit. At Opus 40 you enter the creative habit even if you sometimes set it aside at home, to do the dishes...

Good Stuff Happening in + around Kingston, NY

2008-06-23T20:45:00.006-04:00

The Cool Kingston Campaign, a project of Sustainable Hudson Valley, "is building momentum for a more bike-friendly city with expanded gardens, parks, and tree cover, and mobilizing citizens to engage local government in climate change response. With support from the Fund for the Environment and Urban Life and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), this initiative rallies the community to learn and act on climate change in ways that improve quality of life. Cool Kingston's major project is creating a Green Trail along the Broadway corridor by supporting energy improvements, plantings, public art and cyclist supports such as bike racks, bike route maps and driver education."

Can't wait for more bike racks around here, and a little road space would be nice, too.

The Kingston Victory Gardens Project aims to hook up local urban gardeners, promote fresh food and the donation of surplus to soup kitchens and the like, and begin to organize community gardens. Everyone without a sunny yard should have access to a community garden.

And the garden should be pesticide free. The Ban Pesticides in Ulster County Alliance is organizing in New Paltz, New York for pesticide-free lawns and farming to improve on a recently-passed neighbor notification law. See their link on the Hudson Valley blogroll to the left there.

Yesterday was a bike tour of Kingston, which seemed like a fun idea, but like last year, we thought it would rain. We arrived late and did the tour backwards, skipping most of it. Full info is at Tobacco Free Action Coalition of Ulster County.

I like biking (although I'll like it more when my town is more bike-friendly), but lately my favorite way to do errands within 5-8 blocks of my house is by Razor scooter borrowed from my kids. We got ours for $2 at a yard sale, and I never thought of using it for transportation until a couple of weeks ago. It's perfect for zipping up to my proofreading job three blocks north, picking up copy and zipping home. When people see how old I am they smile or laugh, and it pleases me to be a figure of fun. (PS: Don't ever go over a stick on a razor scooter though. I flew, rolled, and have a nasty painful shoulder that is taking more than a week to heal up.)

Back on topic. Kingston Citizens is a great website and collection of Yahoo groups designed to connect city residents with one another and with their alderpeople. Every locality should have something like that.

Bodily Sovereignty

2008-06-23T14:46:00.002-04:00

I think the recent attempt to pass a bill in New York State requiring CDC-recommended vaccinations is an interesting landmark for the issue of bodily sovereignty. While abortion and same-sex marriage are beleaguered or struggling to establish themselves (two other issues that might be considered under the same category—the right to decide about one's own person), parent-activists in New York just defeated Assembly Bill 10942.

A new bill, Assembly Bill 10942A, would make a meningitis vaccine mandatory for seventh graders. After some days of protests over the lack of debate about this, this one is staying in assembly committee for now (according to State Speaker's office). A Senate bill apparently is still active, but they are getting a lot of calls opposed, so this particular organizing on behalf of bodily sovereignty seems to be very effective.

Best Ceramics Projects for Kids

2008-06-20T15:27:00.004-04:00

My kids have taken a few ceramics classes, and we have shelves full of fired and glazed objects to prove it.

My son likes to do figurines, whether models of characters he has made up or his own versions of commercial faves like Shaggy and Scooby Doo, Lock, Shock, and Barrel, and Davy Jones. They're fun.

I also love bowls, because we really can't have too many bowls for putting out condiments, snacks, and so forth.

But what I really love are flat-slab sushi plates. Isn't this elegant? Try to get your kids to make you some when they're doing ceramics classes. They're handy, beautiful, and they make your food look like gourmet stuff.

Enormous Changes Every Minute

2008-05-14T07:18:00.003-04:00

This is a still from one of my children's first movies, Death is Coming to You, Live! It has been five years since my 11-year-old started his movie company, W.M. Thing. He has made more than a dozen movies, and many more trailers, scripts, and concept drawings since then. He recently turned 11. He is changing so fast—too fast for me. Last night, he and my almost-9-year-old daughter decided to stop going to karate and try some new types of exercise. This morning my son decided to start blogging and he is sitting next to me, posting to his new blog right now. Feels like the big world is invading our sanctuary.

Visiting our karate teacher and telling him we were stopping (I had reached high brown belt, the kids brown), left me feeling dejected. Way back when my kids were toddlers, I read an article in a homeschooling magazine that said sometimes young people will take classes in a discipline, then give it up. Don't worry about the dropping activities, the author said, it's all part of the process. Anything left can be returned to. In my mind I know this is true.

In practice, these little departures are felt as loss just as surely as is my children's loss of their teeth, their baby fat, and their friends—some of whom have moved, some of whom have entered school after years of homeschooling. If falling in love introduces the possibility of loss and grief to a person, having children introduces loss as a constant companion. So many goodbyes.

Right now we are in limbo with respect to new pursuits. A whole lot of writing, animating, moviemaking, music-making is going on, but we need some "out-in-the-world" stuff, and I don't know what it will be...
We've had a year of little goodbyes.

Brooklyn Blogfest

2008-05-13T11:36:00.003-04:00

Here we are, well, three of the four of us, at the Brooklyn Blogfest organized by OTBKB. This picture is one of many taken of bloggers that night by fabulous OTBKB photographer, Hugh Crawford. (The rest are at SmugMug.)

The third annual Blogfest drew hundreds of bloggers to celebrate the power of citizen-powered new media, neighborhood activism, and the power of the local merged with the reach of the digital. Brooklyn bloggers have become the new beat reporters, and their stories have invigorated the life of their communities. The evening ended with a rousing shout-out from the bloggers present. The upshot of the evening: the more the merrier, so get blogging. It would be great to do this in the Hudson Valley. Email me if you're interested in a Hudson Valley Blogfest.

Another Parenting Rage...Free Range

2008-05-13T08:53:00.005-04:00

Free Range Parenting is the next big thing in raising kids, having sprung out of a notorious woman's decision to let her 9-year-old ride the subway. That gave rise to a blog she authors, Free-Range Parenting, articles like this one in the Globe and Mailand this Newsweek piece by my buddy Louise, publisher of Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn.

On a homeschooling list I subscribe to, a mother wryly commented, "sounds kind of like trying to homeschool your schooled children to me." I agree.

So many parenting and educational theories amount to what I call "closet unschooling." In the case of "free-range parenting," parents have caught on that shuttling kids from one activity to another stresses the whole family. Children without enough free time are hampered in their creativity, blocked from taking initiative, and, as the Globe and Mail article says, feel infantilized.

Other examples of closet unschooling: at a Montessori school, there's a homey room full of "work" activities—children can "iron," "sweep," or "do dishes"—the only thing missing is their real home, where there is real work to be done. At the high school I attended, we had an "open space"—a large room where we could hang out in groups, see other students working, kind of an agora, except not outside. How I would have preferred the real thing. In democratic schools, children choose their own activities and participate in decisions affecting administration. It's like real life, but ideally, real life should involve multigenerational interactions, not social units separated by age.

Parenting by instinct, intuition, and personal authenticity can be done without a book, a kit, or a list of tips.

What takes the place of drama classes and school plays at our house: the Play Art Theater, with productions scripted, produced, directed and acted by the owners and operators.

Homemade Veggie Booty

2008-03-27T17:42:00.003-04:00

Discovered in our kitchen: easy to make, cheaper & more nutritious than the commercial variety, requires less packaging, and is unlikely to be recalled:

1. Make a nice big bowl of popcorn

2. In a spice grinder:

sesame seeds
nori torn up to acceptable size for grinding
kelp granules
(equal amounts of these will do fine)

Grind to a coarse meal.

3. Sprinkle on popcorn and salt to taste. Enjoy avoiding salmonella and the vast snack aisle at the market.

Women in Science, Women in Dance

2008-03-27T17:19:00.004-04:00

Two worthy Hudson Valley field trips today:

1. The Cornell Extension Agroforestry Center at Acra (check out their programming link for more info):

My kids are participating in a four-part series of 2-hour programs on Women in Science. The blurb for this proram, which we're enjoying (it's a mix of talk, experimentation, record-keeping, other activities, and watching a DVD):

"Meet women scientists who boldly explore new worlds in this four part series. The Wonderwise: Women In Science Learning Series is a curriculum developed by the University of Nebraska that introduces real scientists to young people. This curriculum was designed for teaching 8 to 12 year old children the basics of scientific investigations. We will watch a DVD about Adriana Ocampo, who searches through Belize for traces of a crater caused by an asteroid that hit earth 65 million years ago. As a space geologist, Adriana compares craters that exist on other planets with ones that are known to exist on earth. We will conduct hands-on experiments that investigate geology. The final day of the series will include a field trip to the Gilboa Museum to view some of the world’s oldest fossilized trees."

Good stuff, great facility, if a little far north for us.

2. Kaatsbaan International Dance Center

Located on 153 acres of land near the Hudson River in Tivoli, New York, at a historic site (the former estate of Eleanor Roosevelt’s grandparents), Kaatsbaan hosts dance residencies, performances, and an "extreme ballet" summer camp for dancers aged 14-plus.

We went to a well-attended free rehearsal of the Carolyn Dorfman Dance Company, which will perform for paying audiences this weekend.

The dance was energetic, the space capacious, but I appreciated the response of my kids: "I hate watching other people dance. They should just let everyone who wants to, get up and dance."

Joining the performance was ruby-throated vocalist Bente Kahan, a "Jewish-Norwegian performing artist, whose production company Teater Dybbuk - Oslo, aims to convey Jewish-European culture and history through drama and music." She sang two heartbreaking songs about the loss of home and family.

This is one of those great nonprofits that is combining land stewardship with a compatible mission, and we'll be going back for more, whether my kids want to or not.

Food Flower for a Happy Spring!

2008-03-25T09:40:00.003-04:00

I've been reading a good macrobiotic food book, The Self-Healing Cookbook by Kristina Turner. Just reading her lists of yin and yang veggies had me off to the market for some roots and shoots I haven't eaten in a while.

In back, there's a really cool food mandala, I guess you'd call it. Others have criticized the "food pyramid" concept and I felt it was time to revise mine, so I made a food flower. Here's a discussion of different food guide shapes suggested by kids. In my opinion, everyone should make their own guide with its own shape, including the foods that make them feel best, in the amounts that make them feel best. I should have put kombucha in the blue ring instead of with the 'tiny amounts' foods in the petals, but otherwise this is my ideal diet.

The Cherry Orchard

2008-03-24T14:30:00.004-04:00

I am please to be spending cherry blossom season in this production of Jean-Claude van Itallie's translation of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. I will play the part of Charlotta Ivanovna.

My favorite birthday present (back in December) was the 13-volume Constance Garnett translation of Chekhov's stories. One for a desert island Top 10.

Homeschoolers take note: there will be a school performance at 10 am on April 16—call the theater and say Oswegatchie sent you and you can reserve seats at $7 a pop.

It is what it is.

2008-03-07T19:19:00.002-05:00

This overused tautology is my latest candidate for the AARP (American Association for Retired Phrases); it is merely a screen for pervasive anxiety that might as well be specified, to wit: it is terrifying, exhausting, draining, poignant. It moves me to tears, to rage, to vengefulness. It is remarkable, fantastic, outrageous. Let's start saying what it really is, instead of feigning the detachment we all aspire to but aren't likely to attain, if we're honest, in this lifetime.

Heart of Glass

2008-02-14T10:28:00.003-05:00

Millerton, New York. I love it there.

Last Friday, my family and I (that's husband, 10-year-old boy, 8-year-old girl) visited the aromatic and delicious Harney Tea store. Favorite teas of the moment: White Christmas, Paris and Rose-Scented.

Then we crossed the street to Gilmor Glass, where we were fortunate (it being a week day) to find a husband-and-wife team of art glass blowers on the job, spectators welcome.

For an hour we grilled them, learned about their training under Czech, Italian and Siberian glassblowers, and watched the making of a goblet and several glass hearts (shown above) for Valentine's Day. This heart is dipped in gold leaf and slowly cooled for 24 hours in a special oven. Broken and irregular glass can be re-melted eight times before it's no good anymore. The dog that hangs out in the workshop does not step in broken glass and get hurt. These and other facts await you at Gilmor Glass. Oh, and if you want to buy anything there, better bring a credit card.

(We have some ice cream bowls from Gilmor that someone got us as a wedding present, long before we ever drove through Millerton. Exquisite.)

Then it was up the block to independent biblioparadise Oblong Books and a chat with kids books maven Michelle Charles, who has a children's books radio show and podcast linked from Oblong's page.

We didn't even have time to walk on the rail trail. Millerton gets a 5-star field trip rating from this unschooling blogger.

One View of Giving Away Old Stuff

2008-02-06T15:49:00.002-05:00

This is from my 8-year-old daughter:

"Within each toy is a concealment of memory. If I give away my toys, I am giving away precious souvenirs and cherished gifts. Each toy has some memory, some purpose for being in your life. It could be annoyance, messiness, dirty-ness, it could be anything."

I don't know why I bother reading Gaston Bachelard.

Internal Restructuring Chez Nous

2008-01-23T15:15:00.000-05:00

We're working up a strategic plan around here and doing some reorganizing of job descriptions.

It all reminds me a little of Hansel and Gretel. In that story, the parents can't wait for attrition to reduce their costs, so they give their kids the big heave-ho.

We're not gonna do that!

In the current iteration of our plan, my husband's job description emphasizes "job search activities." "Making money" has been added to my job description. I started proofreading this week. It was pretty fun, and I am working for a magazine I'd read anyway, except now I go more slowly, hold a red pencil, and get to mark up the margins.

My sister, who used to be an editor at Cambridge Press, is on call if I get in over my head. And my Uncle Bob, who is now an angel hovering around me as I do the work he did for fun at the end of his life, is coming to mind a lot. He used to call me to talk about the books he was proofing or make fun of the publishing industry.

"There are three words that begin with H that no writer should ever use," he once called to say.

"What are they, Uncle Bob?"

"Hermeneutic, haptic, and heuristic. All that's just hogwash."

Dearly Departed

2008-01-23T10:09:00.000-05:00

That car down there done died. It needed a new engine for $4,500 and we said nay.

After much anxiety and soul-searching and careful deliberation and reading of consumer guides and a visit to a new car dealer, we rushed to a used car lot and impulsively bought a 2003 Ford Focus. We couldn't stand to give Enterprise Rent-a-Car another dollar.

The new car looks a lot like the old one and so far, it runs.

Better World Travel Club to the Rescue

2008-01-14T11:30:00.000-05:00

"We work for cars," a friend recently said. Meet our boss, a Volvo V70 that gets us everywhere we can't walk to and often makes us wish we lived near a ZipCar agent.

Yesterday was our second breakdown in a few months, and as I write we are getting a tow to the Volvo dealership in Wappingers Falls, making good use of the 100-mile free tow feature that comes with our membership in Better World Travel Club.

I want to testify that Better World works just as well as AAA, because so few people I talk to even know about it. A travel club that gives roadside emergency assistance to cars AND bicycles, advocates high emissions standards, facilitates eco-friendly travel and puts out an energy-smart e-newsletter, plus auto insurance that offsets your first ton of carbon for free? Yup! Better World also keeps a "triple-A watch" to remind you why you decided to leave the "Arrogant, Anti-environmental, Archaic" auto insurance giant in the ditch.

I don't know what to do with this high-maintenance car. We have talked about a hybrid but in reality, we feel that junking a car is a pretty giant energy consumption right there, so we are doing the best we can to hang on to this one, offset its emissions, and get the best mileage we can out of it. We like the Volvo safety record—my entire family walked away uninjured from an accident in our last Volvo, which was totalled.

A while back I wrote to Volvo to ask them if they are working on hybrid technology or other ecotech and a VP wrote back to say, basically, "No." It was weird and discouraging, considering that the company has a reputation for being, and selling to, the enlightened.

The Daily Doggerel

2008-01-09T00:03:00.000-05:00

.
.

The breast feeds
And the penis seeds.

.
.

Feast or Famine

2008-01-07T15:14:00.000-05:00

Living in a jobless yet wealthy family is kind of strange. When I was in my 20s and lost a job, which happened plenty, I ran out and got temp work. The money came in immediately and I continued living paycheck to paycheck. Now, if my husband loses a job, we sell stock to live until he gets another job. He takes his time and waits for the right thing—last time the wait lasted three years. My point here is, we are jobless but not destitute, we need to tighten our belts right now but how tight? Who knows? Feast and famine at the same time.

With that mental backdrop I and my family drove up to Hudson, NY yesterday to see an HDTV rebroadcast of the Metropolitan Opera's current production (in English when we would have preferred the German) of Hansel and Gretel.

The opera's themes of starvation and scarcity, gluttony and waste, nourishment versus malnutrition, devouring and even a crumbling social order are introduced by painted curtains that rise over each act, depicting an empty plate, a blood-smeared plate, and a smashed plate. The parents' abandonment of their children plays out in their hunger and need.

The design was aiming at a kitchen somewhere between the Depression and World War II, we guessed, and the story resonated well with both periods. In the first act, the mother, having banished Hansel and Gretel to the haunted wood, eats food miraculously brought home by her husband—sausages and sauerkraut—in the most outrageous of several more instances of eating while singing (surely one of the great taboos of the operatic art), tucking food into some corner of her mouth so that when husband Peter tells her that the haunted wood’s witch eats children, she runs to the sink and vomits real food! (The sinks alone fascinated me: Hansel breaks a milk jug in the family sink, then his mother vomits there, in Act II, a magical sink in a forest-room soaks dream dishes in frothy suds and the Dew Fairy dries them).

In the haunted wood, the children fall asleep with help from the Sandman and dream, not of guardian angels but of guardian chefs who lay a table with the only proper nourishment we see in this show—a balanced meal of many colors, clearly not over-cooked, and a tureen of consommé served by a dapper fish. One of the guardian chefs was my brother, but since they wear identical fat suits and masks, I was unable to spot him. Act II is full of lullabies and gorgeous music, and I liked the fanciful staging, Hansel and Gretel pickpocketing their strawberries from tree-figures in suits with branches for heads.

In Act III this production let the very real themes of this story rip, and I, my husband and our ten- and eight-year-old boy and girl were left unsettled by it. The witch's kitchen, the third and last of the opera, is oversized and metallic, reminiscent of a slaughterhouse, which indeed it is. The witch trusses up Hansel like a goose and then, using a funnel and hose, force-feeds him pastries that she has pulverized to paste in a blender, a mockery of the inhumane techniques used to prepare foie gras—the cannibalism of the story extended to suggest that to eat animals is to eat our own kind. (Lapsed vegan talking.)

After the brother and sister gleefully lock the witch in the oven (where we watch her burn) they dance, and Gretel nonchalantly smears a chocolate Hitler mustache under the nose of Hansel, who ends the opera by taking a big bite out of the broiled witch’s leg. If nobody in my family liked Act III, it may be because it so successfully elicited our horror and disgust, no-doubt thanks to close-up views of the stage action. All in all I think I would prefer this menacing version to the beirgarden aesthetic that seems to prevail in productions of Hansel and Gretel. A rich, even (necessarily) nauseating treatment of a dense and resonant fairy tale.

PS: Do we LOVE the HDTV Met broadcast program? YES! The venue we attended, Time and Space Limited, has been doing great avant-garde and community work for decades. They can use the full houses this is bringing in, and anyone who can't afford to visit the Met in person certainly deserves a cheaper way to enjoy opera. Bravo, Met.

Axed! Canned! Sacked! Jazzed! A Red Eft Kit

2008-01-05T17:52:00.000-05:00

The mild-mannered developer of the house was humming along in a garden full of bugs yesterday when BLIP!—his connection to his virtual work world vanished! The phone then rang and he was told that his betters were faced with some "tough decisions."

As a certain six-year-old we know would say, "Flying Fatso Happy New Year!"

Scary legal documents that subsequently arrived by FedEx prevent me from offering further details, but suffice it to say, my hubbie has been liberated from the digital dungeon where he has done his best to make better for these last two years.

One doesn't know whether to feel exhilarated or anxious, and maybe there's no difference between them.

Thoughts fly.

Refuse to work for The Man ever again!
Unjob!
Cancel that Netflix sub!
Sell gas giant and find shotgun shack-like dwelling!
Continue as usual and assume answers are in transit!
Leap and the net will appear! Do what you love and the millions will follow!
Start a green business! But don't work all the time!
Run out and apply at needy Barnes & Noble and Starbucks, pronto!
Shop WalMart!
No! Mustn't do that! Keep buying organic-expensive-local-quality! No! Stop shopping, eat snow!

So. Thoughts fly and cliches follow.

I searched on "what to do when you lose your job." Everyone agrees to these preliminaries:

1. Don't panic.

2. Find out when COBRA starts.

3. File for unemployment.

I try never to say this, but DUH! How about...

Red Eft's What to Do When You're Axed, Canned or Sacked: Get Jazzed!

1. Pull out a giant piece of paper and doodle what you would most like to do with your brief time left on Earth, now that this phase of your wage slavery has ended. Include anything and everything, moneymaking or not.

2. Celebrate. You no longer work for people who don't appreciate you. A celebration needn't be expensive to be boisterous. It's OK to cry at a celebration. OK to throw a plate at a wall. Just remember you don't want to be spending money right now replacing broken plates.

3. Order (through your neighborhood independent bookseller) Making a Living While Making a Difference: The Expanded Guide to Creating Careers with a Conscience. The third edition, just out from New Society Publishers and printed on 100% recycled paper, was written by our tenant, Melissa Everett, director of Sustainable Hudson Valley. It even mentions the aforementioned mild-mannered but SACKED developer very briefly, near the beginning. Buy this book for yourself, for friends and enemies. Buy it by the bushel so we can raise Melissa's rent and retire early!

4. Look at it this way:

Actually, no. Maybe you'll look at it however you look at it, moment by moment. You might like to ignore condescending people who tell you how to look at it ("could be a good thing," "hey be thankful you had a job at all, ever," etc.). Being fired may suck. Losing your job may turn out to be the greatest gain of your life. Your moods may swing from speechless astonishment to logorrheic excitement. We who've been here, that is to say, AXED, support you in your ambivalence. We won't say "hey, you could be dead, or terminal, or blah blah blah."

5. Remember that only by refusing to do the wrong thing can you find the right thing. Save space for the right things and CAN what does not serve.

Stage Dog

2008-01-04T21:07:00.001-05:00

I'm in a production of The Cherry Orchard, and my character, Charlotta, is supposed to have a little dog, but the director is wary of working with animals, and who can blame him? So I'm using a puppet.

I am mighty envious of my brother, a staff actor at the Metropolitan Opera in NYC, who just finished a stint in War and Peace as Tsar Alexander, pictured here with his delightfully well-mannered, highly trained fellow cast member, Jumpin' Jack Flash, a Maltese.

Great Snow Vacation with Kids—Lake Placid & Burlington

2008-01-03T10:13:00.000-05:00

We just got back from 11 lucky days of snow and fun in Lake Placid, New York and Willison (near Burlington), Vermont.

Highlights for us (though there are tons more things to do in these places):

LAKE PLACID
Family-owned Maple Leaf Inn—right in town, had a room with a kitchenette, reasonably priced (children under 10 stay free with parent). We could walk to the outdoor Olympic speed skating oval, which had public hours in the afternoon and at night—with a bonfire and holiday lights, the skating oval is not to be missed! I love skating while it's snowing!

The sleigh ride at the White Face Club with draft horses, jingle bells and plenty of blankets was most serene. If you've never had a sleigh ride, put it on your list of things to try.

Christmas dinner at Jimmy's on Main Street, overlooking Mirror Lake, was notable for its low-key atmosphere and reasonable price (try feeding a family of four a Christmas dinner at one of the fancier places for under $100). (If you're looking for hotels, a friend of mine stayed at The Golden Arrow and really liked that.)

For Cross-Country skiing, we loved Cascade Cross-Country Ski Center. Beautiful groomed trails, kid-friendly, nice people, spacious wooden lodge with big fire, veggie chili and Glögg—a sweet, hot wine beverage—and a brown-bag table for those who bring their own lunch. Here we are on one of their tree-filled trails:

The trip over to Vermont, on a car ferry across Lake Champlain, afforded spectacular mountain views, but on the way back—whoa!—white caps, water washing across the deck, a rocking ferry, spray freezing on our windshield so we couldn't see where we were going, yikes, I'm too much of a landlubber for that!

WILLISTON, VERMONT
Not far outside Burlington we found this family vacation jewel: The Catamount Outdoor Family Center. Jim and Lucy McCullough converted their 500-acre farm to a year-round haven for mountain bikers & hikers, skiers, sledders and snowshoers. The green B&B, which is attached to the ski center, was originally built by the first governor of Vermont, and the house is full of character and history. Jim and Lucy wisely made their center a non-profit so it will be around for future generations, and it's a rich resource to their community, with kids programs, local high school ski team training, night skiing on two lit trails and a sledding hill that will give you quite a chiropractic adjustment on a cold day.

We loved it there and hope to return for biking. Jim and Lucy have the right livelihood thing down pat, and they make a mean baked oatmeal, the recipe for which they readily share:

Amish Baked Oatmeal

3 cups oatmeal
1 cup brown sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 scant tsp salt
2 beaten eggs
1 cup butter or olive oil or some other oil
1 cup milk

Mix, put in baking dish or ramikins (that's how we had it—YUM).
Bake 30 minutes, 350 degrees farenheit.

Can't recommend Catamount highly enough for family fun!

Was Tolstoy Left-Handed?

2007-11-20T08:31:00.000-05:00

Several southpaw sites, which give me, another leftie, pleasure, claim the Count for one of our own. But a quick online search turns up only portraits of him, like this one, as a rightie:

Did the artist lie? Did Tolstoy pretend? Have the sinistral activists been passing a bum meme?

I'm hoping someone who reads this will know.

Nightmarish Chez Moi

2007-11-02T07:31:00.000-04:00

My kids have nightmares about dismemberment, monsters and Count Olaf.

Here is the nightmare content of the sleep period from which I just awakened (or DID I?):

-my mother-in-law is angry with me

-my mother invites a big crowd in to a buffet meal just before we all have to get in a car and leave. "Mom, do we have to clean this up before we go?"

-to a guest I say, nearly in tears, "Everything in this house is broken or about to be broken."

-I have to drive to Syracuse and back in one day, without a map. After lots of guesswork I say to a man who has called my cell phone, "I can see the Carrier Dome!"

-my friend will be coming with me, my kids and my husband on this long car trip. "We'll have to eat in the car, there's no time." I say. "No!" she says, "I can't do that, we'll have to stop!" That's after we clean up the buffet dinner. We will arrive home very late.

-I don't know how to get all these people in the car to leave on this trip.

Giant Food

2007-11-01T09:37:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, we shopped at the Giant. That says it all. It was a vast, freezing place that we had to meander through endlessly to find what was on my Mom's list. I much preferred our occasional visits to the local grocer in a nearby town. Maybe they didn't have as much stuff, but the temperature was reasonable and you could walk across the entire floor of the place in ten seconds.

Now, my favorite place to shop is a food co-op with TWO aisles. I can find pretty much everything I need there. The only problem with the co-op is I have to drive to get to it. But I can walk to Hannafords, my town's version of the Giant.

Despite its size and subzero climate, Hannafords hasn't been so bad, because they had a special organic area on the left side of the store where I did all my shopping. This summer I got used to walking downhill to Hannafords early in the morning and getting my shopping done while nobody was there. Toting my bags home was a good strength workout.

Then they did a bad thing.

They started taking all their organic and whole foods and shoving them in among all the other highly-processed crap they sell. The transition is now virtually complete. What was the organic section at my Hannfords is now the cookies and chips section, and if I want "my kind of food" (those edibles least likely to kill me in this 21st century), I must wear roller blades or plan to spend the day wandering the toxic-smelling aisles of the wasteland that is contemporary American food, except where "organic" has made some inroads. I know this is probably a good development for the crapeaters, who may now incorporate some pesticide-free fruit or brown rice into their diets, but I am vexed. I want my ghetto back.

Surrounding the Dragon

2007-10-22T18:00:00.000-04:00

So as I said before I have a lipoma on my arm.

It may grow or it may not. If it grows it may become uncomfortable. If I don't have surgery now, and it grows, it may be harder to operate later. Maybe. Who knows.

I'm going to try to get rid of it myself. Illustrated above is the acupuncture technique known as "surrounding the dragon," which a friend taught me so I could do it myself every day. The rest of these items she suggested or I found online by poking around. Who knows if they'll work but I think I'll give it several months and if the thing isn't growing, consider it a success.

Lipoma Reduction Regimen

chickweed tincture
lecithin
Omega oils (flax, borage, Evening Primrose, cod liver)
Aboca Cleanse and Detox Phytosolution
digestive enzymes
topical: rosemary oil, castor oil alternated with Topricin homeopathic ointment

I will revise this post later to reflect my results.

January 2008:

Many times I have thought the lipoma was getting smaller. But then it looks bigger again. It doesn't seem to have grown. Could be a bit smaller. Certainly ain't gone. Of the above, I'm out of everything except flax oil and digestive enzymes, which I haven't been taking every day. After a few weeks I ran out of acupuncture needles. Right now my strategy is to ignore the damn thing and hope that it will feel lonely and go away.

Death Penalty

2007-10-09T14:55:00.001-04:00

My sisters and I were emailing about the Presidential race because of a narrowly-drawn internet quiz that ranks the Democratic and Republican candidates according to your level of agreement with them. (What about the other parties that participate in our vibrant participatory democracy, you ask? Don't ask.) For two of us, support for the death penalty was a deal-breaking issue. For me, it's tied to torture—the torture of the detained, the torture of the detainer and the torture of medical professionals who should not be asked to administer lethal injections and other staff saddled with the responsibility of committing executions.

Must read:

Albert Camus, "Reflections on the Guillotine," from Resistance, Rebellion and Death.

Must hear:

David Isay and Stacy Abramson, producers, Witness to an Execution (audio).

These 2008 U.S. candidates oppose the death penalty: Elaine Brown, Dennis Kucinich, Christopher Dodd, Barack Obama, Mike Gravel, Ron Paul.

How Cats Smell

2007-09-21T09:14:00.000-04:00

Once while improvising the dialogue for a movie, my daughter, aged three at the time, said, "My mother calls me Miss I-Love-You because I smell nice."

It's true that smelling nice goes a long way toward making a creature lovable.

One reason I am a cat person is that cats smell nice.

Today our cat, Pat Lavender Will, smells like:

a tatami mat.

Nice smell.

Other days he smells like:

cookies baking

bread rising under a dish cloth

pretzels just out of the oven

forest after rain storm

a bed of moss sitting under a fern

my edition of Great Expectations

A cat, curled and sleeping, smells most intensely of the nice smell s/he's smelling of on that particular day. The fur of the somnolent cat traps the aromas of happy human emotional memory. This is one way in which cats heal humans. Also, their purring quite possibly cures ills (theirs and ours) through vibration, but I don't want to stray from the topic of Cats Smell Nice.

This may not win me friends in certain quarters, but dogs never smell like the items on my list. Too often, dogs' coats smell of sour cheese and their breath of poo. When I meet a nice-smelling dog, I confess, I am surprised. Glad, but surprised. And cats don't drool, but I don't want to go on comparing and comparing, like some people do, for example the makers of the Hollywood movie Cats and Dogs, a vehicle so stereotyped and rejecting of cats that it inspired my daughter to make an oppositional film critical of Dogs, called Dogs and Cats.

For a spiritual moment with your feline friend, enjoy reading aloud "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffrey," by Christopher Smart, 1722-1771

Magnetic Reaction Incident

2007-09-10T19:11:00.001-04:00

"There is no pain. The magnetic field and radio waves are not felt."

—Online Medical Encyclopedia on having an MRI

There's a funny swelling on my arm that I noticed this summer on vacation while taking a walk along the lake road with my mom. "Hm, this is funny," kind of thing. Below the elbow.

My naturopath thought it might be a lipoma or a cyst. He said go see someone who can order an MRI. I found an osteopath that is actually! covered! by! my! health! insurance! (United Healthcare). He thought it might be simple swelling from an injury or possibly a sarcoma. I had the MRI today.

Two very nice technicians positioned me on my stomach with my head turned in a way that would be comfortable for an owl but was rather severe for a mere human and told me not to move. This was after much finessing of pillows and towels; they did their best. After the first image was done—I assume it was done because the random knocking and buzzing had stopped—maybe during the second image, my arm began to tingle and spasm. This happened only from the elbow down, the part of me that was inside the smaller tube. The rest of me was crammed inside the larger tube, the one you see when you look at a picture of an MRI machine.

After 40 minutes or so of that, right before I was going to squeeze the panic button and tell them thanks but no thanks because my neck and shoulders were aching so much,the technicians popped my tray out of the MRI oven to give me an injection of gadolinium (look it up and ask if you're going to have it!) before the contrast images. I said "I'm having a weird sensation of tingling and spasms. I can feel the magnetism and it's rather unpleasant."

Nurse: That's probably your arm falling asleep from the awkward position.

Me: No. I don't feel it unless the machine is taking an image. It's the magnetism I'm feeling.

Technician: She's probably right. Some people are sensitive to radiomagnetic fields.

Oh yeah! I forgot! Cell phones, electrical lines, microwaves, all that good stuff that's not really so good, and sometimes we notice its effects! I thought of William Hurt at the end of Altered States, when his arm goes all barmy and primeval, with what appears to be throbbing string cheese spiraling under his skin. It felt like that looked, if you know what I mean.

Nurse: How about this injection? You ready?

Me: Not if this gadolinium stuff is going to make these sensations stronger, because I don't particularly like them.

Technician: That won't happen. The way it was explained to me, it's like a whole lot of little tiny magnets in your tissue, to make a better image.

Yuck?!

I reminded myself that I was engaged in a safe and painless process and said well, okay.

I don't know what my bump is yet, but I do know that having an MRI is not necessarily a sensation-free experience. It took quite a bit of googling to find out anything but the "MRIs are Safe and Painless Unless You're a Severe Claustrophobe" School of Radiology.

I searched on MRI and sensitivity, sensations, tingling, radiomagnetic, may experience, I feel sensitive, electromagnetic, etc. Finally I reached various organizations that deal with ElectroSensitivity or Electrical Hypersensitivity.

I'm kind of sensitive to the term sensitive.

Feels like a way of blaming the canary.

My arm still feels weird.

I hope someone else who has experienced the sensations that can accompany the realignment of atoms in the human body will find this and feel a little less alone.

Check out:

Electrosensitivity—UK

Powerwatch

Here's a tune composed with MRI machine sounds as the percussive track

Here are MP3 files of the MRI machine sounds

That last site is for kids but it's better for adults about to have an MRI than the adult sites I looked at, except for the fact that no one mentions possible side effects experienced by those with electromagnetic sensitivity, and maybe they should.

Yoo Hoo, Anyone Home?

2007-08-25T22:02:00.000-04:00

Not much, actually. I'm out running around a lot. Run, red eft, run!

How did I spend my summer, you ask?

Well my dear, I was eck-ting! I even got paid to do it! Somehow I got roped into being a cast member in a murder mystery dinner theater. This one takes place on a boat that goes up and down the Hudson. I played a 50s beauty queen in one and a Texan sheriff in the other (see if you can find me as Sheriff Wesson!)

I like to think I brought a heavy dose of realness to these roles. It was gobs of fun and I almost made enough money to pay for the IPhone I got my hubby for his birthday! Here he is modeling it:

Yes, you've seen Fred MacMurray at his merriest and now you've seen my husband at his geekiest. He has been enjoying hacking the thing and the two of them are inseparable. "Iphone therephore I am," he has been known to say.

Other cool things about the summer: my son got up on two waterskis, my daughter started studying the harp, my parents got to visit their summer home in a new incarnation— beautifully rebuilt, painted and decorated by my sister, and a different sister, who was to be married in September narrowly escaped a bad match when her fiancé, a few weeks before the big day, backed out. One can only breathe a sigh of relief! Close call, girlfriend!

Favorite recordings heard this summer: the dramatic monologues of Ruth Draper, the new CD by Joanna Newsome, Nabokov's Lolita read by Jeremy Irons

Favorite readings read this summer: essays by David Mamet, even when they bug me which is often; Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis, the story "Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed" by Robert Olen Butler, anything and everything on Ubuweb

In literary news, I had a story published on Pindeldyboz

And in much more significant literary news, the phenomenal Grace Paley passed on. As summer becomes fall I will read and re-read my favorite story of hers, "Wants," I will wish she'd lived to see those wants fulfilled, and I will remember her as a generous, kind, receptive teacher. When I met her at a writing institute she came and sat down at a table next to me at lunchtime and struck up a conversation like we were old friends. She looked a bit like my grandmother, but she wrote like nobody else.

Scene Studies

2007-06-05T12:23:00.001-04:00

I'm taking an acting class, my second one with the same teacher and most of the same folks. Serious fun.

What are your favorite books on theater/performance/acting?

A few I have been reading:

Uta Hagen's Acting Class DVD (you can watch some of it online)
Respect for the Actor by Uta Hagen
True and False and Writing in Restaurants by David Mamet
John Heilpern's Conference of the Birds: Peter Brook in Africa
The Shifting Point by Peter Brook
Brecht on Theatre
Sanford Meisner On Acting (you can also find a doc'y about him on YouTube)
Towards a Poor Theater by Jerzy Grotowski

Reading Coming Up

2007-06-05T12:19:00.000-04:00

Michael Ruby + Nancy Graham
poems, prose + a collaboration based on Samuel Beckett's Texts for Nothing
June 21, 2007
8 pm
The Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn
JJ Byrne Park on Fifth Avenue between 3rd and 4th Street
$5.00 includes light refreshments

I Want to Ride My Bike I Want to Ride it Where I Like

2007-05-22T10:32:00.000-04:00

After a successful Mother's Day outing on the beautiful rail trail between New Paltz and Rosendale, I and my family plan to ride in the 2nd Annual June 3rd Tour de Kingston 5 mile loop. Early in the day there will be longer, hillier rides.

I think we can expect more better bike lanes around here in the very near future.

Here's what others are up to:

Building a Better Bike in the Wall Street Journal

One thing I loved about Portland, Oregon (one of the bike-friendliest cities in the U.S.) was seeing bike racks everywhere, even at the airport, in fact we took light rail to our plane home with an airport employee who had biked to the train. At Patagonia, which is situated in an eco-building with a green roof, they have a pie chart showing how people get to work, with the biggest slice of pie going to bikers.

Flow, In and Out of School

2007-05-17T08:06:00.000-04:00

We're losing a dear homeschooling friend to public school next year. She'll be a teenager soon, and she wants to spend her days with peers. We'll miss her but we understand. You just never know what you're going to need, and options for young people are still somewhat limited, what with so much energy tied up in formal schooling.

On the other hand, we're gaining a no-schooler. Some highly-esteemed friends of ours whose daughter has been bullied at school are taking her out. We've already planned a 'not-back-to-school' trip to Maine with them in the fall, so this is very exciting!

Another friend whose teenage son was 'not asked back' to his private school (his worst offense seems to have been asking a teacher why he was being such a jerk) is thinking about letting him learn with home as his main base.

We're holding the course, but I'd be the last one to say it's easy or anxiety-free. You have to stay flexible, tune in to what everyone needs, and above all, remember there's no curriculum for the most important things in life.

(Gosh do I hate that word curriculum. Sounds like speculum and feels like one, too.)

My son is deep into a 3D Graphics program called Cheetah right now, and doing beautiful work with it. He read three Oz books this week. If I were going to level a criticism at him, it would have to be, "You read too much." And that would be a dopey thing to say, would it not? We do have to worm our way through math somehow, and we haven't hit our stride with it. I read him an essay on math anxiety the other day, which he really liked. So a thing I'm thinking about right now is the topic of math anxiety, and myths about math learning, as a path into math.

There are days where everyone is in their flow (see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—this is really what learning outside an institution is all about). Yesterday, my daughter and I shot some footage for her movie called Poet Tree, about Emily Dickinson, while my son had a 'special day' with a dear friend and educator we know, hanging out in her tipi, tending a fire, hiking, petting her dog, chatting.

Other days all I can think is, I need some time alone. So I'm off to Omega Institute for the weekend, for some meditation, yoga, serious writing time, kayaking and good food. So...this weekend is dedicated to my own flow.

Here's a plug for unschooling and our family from the amazing Steinski, a DJ and music maven who keeps a great blog. It links to our websites so I'm sort of setting up a loop by linking to it, but it's really cool that he posted this, and I like seeing my kids doing what they love on someone else's blog for a change!

Like our new bumper sticker says, "life is the school, love is the lesson."

Best Exercise Music

2007-05-03T07:53:00.000-04:00

Happy Sad by Pizzicato Five.
Cosmic Thing by the B52s.

I would like to post a list of my many favorite NordicTracking songs, but unfortunately this is basically it. None can match the funk perfection of Happy Sad. Its beat is exactly made for the stride tempo of the NordicTrack.

There are others I like fine: some tunes by They Might Be Giants, selections from Buddha Bar, Pata Pata by Miriam Makeba. Deadbeat Club and Dry County by the B52s are perfect, and Happy Sad is perfect.

If you know other perfect NordicTrack songs, will you please post them or email me? One can only listen to Happy Sad so many hundreds of times, and although I am not yet tired of the B52s, it could happen.

red eft's Diet Kit

2007-05-02T13:37:00.000-04:00

1. Don't think of it as weight loss, think of it as Diet Refinement, a gradual, permanent process.

2. Follow these 50 diet tips. Good advice.

3. Spirulina is good stuff. So is kombucha. So is green tea. So is water.

4. Put your house on a low-carbon diet and think of it like you think of your body as per #1.

5. Remember to snack.

6. Enjoy feeling great, which is the point.

Let Loose Some Weight!

2007-05-02T09:56:00.000-04:00

My sister is getting married in September and she wants to lose weight before the wedding. So she started an email group with her three sisters, me being one. At first I pooh-poohed the idea. I don't believe in dieting to lose weight, because people always gain it back, me included. But I do believe in changing eating habits, refining one's diet and raising one's awareness, and I've been thinking about food a lot lately—eating from local farms, eating things I can buy in walking distance of my house, etc., so with a view to improving my longevity and supporting my other diets—the low-carbon diet for my house and tentative steps toward the 100-mile diet for my household, I decided to give it a try.

I've discovered some things I hope to make permanent features of the way I eat. I don't eat enough protein or fiber, though I'm changing that. I can learn not to take too many helpings. These are great diet tips. (The best one is to use the dowloadable program recommended by this guy. I love it, but I don't feel like sounding like an ad by mentioning its name.)

I needed to up my water intake, something I always have trouble doing, but now that I keep a food diary I drink 6 glasses a day. Because I record my exercise, I walk more and even get more cleaning and yard work done. (I still love my manual mower for the exercise, the sound, and the smell of fresh cut grass unsullied by exhaust.)

The other nice thing is being in better touch with my sisters. The one that started the list has always been a comically poor speller, so she writes to us about "loosing weight" and we've all adopted the term. Let that weight loose, quit keeping it prisoner! We have talked a bit about the way eating less, and eating and exercising right, are good for the planet. One of my sisters decided to walk her errands instead of running them in a car. Another sister lives in California and gets to eat local produce all year long. (Which reminds me, I can't wait to start getting my Rondout Valley Organics CSA pickup at the Kingston Farmer's Market.)

Meanwhile my house is preparing to loose some carbon weight next winter. Two men are in our attic, laying foam insulation and plywood. What a lot of crap we have up there, poor guys spend hours moving boxes back and forth so they can get to the floor. We'll have to loose some stuff when they are done, and then we'll be lighter every day in every way.

7. Green - somniloquy

2007-05-01T10:28:00.000-04:00

I have a new poem up on the revamped Chronogram website, sort of a St. Patty's Day somniloquy. Part of the revamping is to put display ads in the middle of poems! Isn't that uniquely excruciating? I sent in feedback, so I hope by the time you follow this link that policy will have been relegated to the digital dustbin...