Bye, Bye Jan Berenstain, Soother of Souls

In the wake of Jan Berenstain's death, I  remember how her rollicking bear family ushered me through some tricky parenting moments. I was lucky enough to have a treasure trove of Berenstain Bears books drop into my lap roughly five or six years ago, back when my 8-year-old was still a toddler. A neighbor had cleaned out her kid’s bookshelves. The Berenstain Family charged into my imagination once again after a long, long sabbatical: Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Sister and Brother Bear, and eventually “Baby Makes Five." Click over to Publishing Perspectives to read the rest... 

Emily Dickinson Comes to New York

The Emily Dickinson exhibit at the Poet's House in Battery Park has been extended from January 28th to February 18th. I now have a chance to get there before it leaves. I read a lot of Emily Dickinson in college, and was interested for a time in how her poetry was arranged into chapbooks after she died. In one class we studied the arrangements and determined collectively that the organization of the poetry in and of itself impacted the poetry's meaning significantly, so who knows what the heck she really meant?

Around that time, I went to visit her home in Amherst, and was struck by how tiny her bedroom was. In it was a glass case that housed one of her dresses; it hung, ghostly, on a headless mannequin form. From that, one could see how little she was, and up in that room I could imagine that it would become too hot in the summertime, and too cloistered, though after a point I believe this was self-imposed.

The exhibit at the Poet's House showcases "a recipe" (how mysterious!). I'm betting that it's her gingerbread, which she hoisted down to children in a basket from her upstairs window.

Here is my favorite ED piece, which was read by Stingo in the film of Styron's Sophie's Choice:

Ample make this Bed --
Make this Bed with Awe --
In it wait till Judgment break
Excellent and Fair.

Be its Mattress straight --
Be its Pillow round --
Let no Sunrise' yellow noise
Interrupt this Ground --

Dusting Off Poetry

A few months ago I joined the writing community She Writes. Truth be told, navigating another social media site isn't something that I long to extract out of each day, but the pull of the talent, comaraderie, and connections proved to be too much to turn away from. I check in a couple of times a week to find some beautiful new blogs I've never heard of, and eavesdrop on interesting discussions with writers in different circles (I've joined the Essay Writers and Mother Writers groups). One day I saw a call for poetry on a big-hearted website that I'd never heard of before, Everyday Poets. I decided, What the Hell, may as well dust off some old poetry and send it in. What could it hurt? I'm always trying to open new doors in my brain, shake things up, keep things fresh, and somewhere buried in the mess of all this is a long love affair with poetry.

So far, so good! I've had two poems accepted, the first one which ran yesterday (scroll to January 29th to read "My Neighbor"). My Neighbor was written years ago after my Chinese neighbor Chin Lee took an interest in my new family. She's very old, and still wears a Mao jacket. I can't converse with her in words-- we always mime, and hug, and squeeze each other's shoulders. She has adored Jamie since he was a baby, and used to do this thing which initially surprised me--  she took two fingers and slapped his little face repeatedly, but out of him emerged a big grin every single time. We have this connection of utter fondness, but I couldn't tell you much about her other that what I've observed on the street, in the hallway, and for brief glimpses years back, in her tiny studio apartment.

Chin Lee seemed to collect cans for a living, and visited a food bank weekly. Every time she'd return, she'd knock on my door and hand me boxes of crackers and cans of peaches and applesauce. She'd point to Jamie and make noises and smile and then point to the cans, and she'd aggressively push them into my hands, nodding her head. It was so nice, and I was so overwhelmed with new mom status, that often it would bring me to tears.

I couldn't stop thinking about her kindness, and the way we communicated without sharing the same language, and so who knows when, but a poem began to take shape in my mind and then came out, probably at some odd hour of the night. I've been so busy writing for a living, that I've ceased to entertain those more random thoughts that pull together before inextricably forming into a shape. Dusting off old poems from my hard drive has challenged me to see if I can reserve a small bit of my solitary thinking time to find those stories and word threads once again. I thank the editors at Everyday Poets for reigniting the tiny flame of validation I guess I needed to give myself the permission. I think I'll even carve out a small chunk of time to check out the Emily Dickinson exhibit at the Poets House before it leaves in a week or so.

Here Come The Bullies.

This didn't take long. I look at my Mom clock, and it says "Third grade." I consider the old adage "Boys will be boys", and think about how rough play has crossed ever so quietly into bullying territory, until it's so loud it can no longer be ignored. When I first begin examining my kids, say, toddler behavior, I worked to develop my own personal discipline philosophy. A refrain I ran into over and over again was the helpful "Label the action, not the child." So when I hear insults lobbed on the playground from child to child in very personal ways, it's painful to listen to, because the result of this cowardly violence is to attack one's self esteem and make them feel scared.

Take yesterday's "You're stupid!", and in case that wasn't heard, "You're of low-intelligence!", both of which were shouted at my kid by the pitiful ruffian. Forget for a moment that this couldn't be further from the truth; in this context I'll refrain from rattling off incredible grades and test scores that took my breath away, because that's irrelevant: it shouldn't matter either way. In this moment, my child's very character was being labeled in a way that's untrue and unfair. Sadly, I can only guess that the perpetrator's character is regularly debased by his parents. Maybe, or maybe not, one of them says that he is "of low intelligence", because which 8-year-old speaks like that anyway? Why else would cruelty slide off of his young tongue so easily?

Now what happens when the language becomes not just mean, but threatening? Take yesterday's, "If you say you're best friends with Jamie, then I'm going to hurt you!"

Having a conversation with the parents won't make any difference. I've seen their passivity on the playground more times that I can count. These parents allow their 8-year old to watch Friday the 13th films and World Wrestling Federation matches, and I have no idea what video games he's into. If they hear these slights tumble from his mouth, they'll tell him not to say those things, but there is no understood consequence for the behavior. It's accepted, plain and simple.

What should we do in this situation? We work hard to teach Jamie that he's not a victim; rather, the other child has a problem, and in fact we might feel sorry for this kid because clearly he's hearing this abusive language somewhere, whether it's inside the Wrestling ring or on the Disney Channel or out of his parent's mouths. We try to teach our kid to brush things off, to laugh in their faces, to try not to give it any notice... to not show them how much it bothers him... but doesn't he have the right to live in a safe world where his space isn't threatened like this?

For now, I hold my tongue on the school yard. After asking for advice from other parents, and reading articles on the topic, I've crafted a letter that I've sent to the school principal, his teacher, and have cc:d a school counselor who I know very well and trust implicitly. We'll see how this goes.

Let me add that when I posted about this on Facebook asking for advice from friends, I felt tempted to take the post down. If I'm being honest, I felt ashamed of not being able to solve it on my own and make it better. The Band-Aids don't work for these unseen Boo-boos that haunt him the most before he tries to close his eyes at night.  I'm working through this, trying to identify these feelings. I don't want to over think everything, but in the case of children and threats and violence, I don't think you can over react or over think.

Downton Rodent Abbey

We caved at Christmas and got Jamie a pet. Actually, we got him three pets, the Flying Roborovski Sisters. They are Masha (with the spot on her eye), Irena (with the more jagged lines on her back), and Olga (who wears a perfect gray diamond on her back). Roborovski Dwarf Hamsters are a revelation of cuteness. They run all night long on their hamster wheels, so much so that we had to replace the metal wheels in the picture above with the far more expensive "Silent Spinners." I didn't realize at the time that I'd bought the metal wheels with slotted rungs that they were a deathtrap to the Three Sisters. Their little feet could get caught in the rungs, and yikes! I don't even want to think about them getting crushed between the wheel and the metal stand. I thought my initial solution was pretty creative... the paper that you see covering the rungs is actually a thick-grade watercolor paper that I cut into strips and taped onto the inner perimeter. Perfect for making them safe, and easy to replace when they get a bit hamstered-out.

Why hamsters? Allergies, for one. Jamie's incredibly allergic to dogs and cats, though he's possibly growing out of it. They used to give him severe asthma attacks, and now he just gets rashes and welts on his face. Unless he has a cold, and then he still gets asthma. I have hope that he'll continue to age of this. So for him,  the hamsters are ideal because they live in a glass aquarium with a screened lid, so dander doesn't fly out of their cage when they dig and dig in their bedding for jewels like half-eaten sunflower seeds and wooden chew toys. They're too fast to hold and pet, but they'll run through your fingers and take little seeds from your hands. They're easy to travel with in our car (we travel with hamsters now!) and you don't have to walk them. They're very social, and three seems to be the perfect dynamic. They're so small (roughly 3 inches) that we figured 3 dwarfs equals one Teddy Bear hamster. When we first went to visit them at Petco, there were no less than 20 in the cage.  We studied them and were amused by their antics. They crawl all over each other, sit on their haunches when they eat, sleep on their backs and run back and forth and back and forth. They had only one hamster wheel, which is cruel, but I didn't understand that before bringing them home.

When I went back the next day to seal the deal, there were only three left! Strangely, Jim and I had agreed before I left that three was the magic number, and so I scooped up the lot. I brought home a little cage, and we decided it was far too small. They would survive, but a 20 gallon tank gives them more room to run and play, and now, they're quite at home. They love bits of raw cabbage and carrots, and paper towel holders which they promptly pull their nesting in for dark and comfy sleep before chewing holes through it. Fortunately, there's always another roll in the works for when they destroy these.

Their bad neighbors, the nocturnal house mice, taunt them at 9:00 p.m. every night. One will poke his little brown or gray head out from the stove, and run under the table to catch a piece of discarded rice or a random Cheerio. I used to have no reservations about putting out snap traps, and still will for household hygiene, but we're not teeming with them. There may be a couple at this point. Now I see them as the Butler and Footmen to the Royal Roborovski's. The "Upstairs" Sisters get to live in their mansion with their expensive toys, while the "Downstairs" mice have to huddle under the stove, scrounge for scraps, and fear for their lives. It's not quite as juicy as Downton Abbey, but it's a drama that unfolds in our home day by day.

She Writes

A few weeks ago I was prompted to join She Writes by my friend and colleague Kathleen Sweeney. She Writes is a huge online community of (you guessed it) women who write everything from novels to poetry to essays. The number of members, to the best of my knowledge, hovers at 17,000. I've already met some interesting writers, and have joined a few groups: a mother writing group, and an essay writer's group. I've even traveled the road of submitting poetry after spotting a call for entries, and shock of shockers, two poems have been accepted, but more on that later.

I'm excited because today my She Writes blog entry about St. Mark's Bookstore being saved by the community of writers, readers, neighbors is their featured post. Click [here] to take a look. I cross-post many of my NYLF entries over there, but as this was a solicited blog entry I'm parking it over there exclusively...

We meet de Kooning

The abstract de Kooning that knocked him to his knees

Yesterday we hopped on the F train to hit MOMA for an hour or so before the Willem de Kooning retrospective leaves town in a few days. While I was happy to be able to use my New School ID to skip the entrance line, I was kicking myself for not making it up before the last rush. I'm not one of those people that can experience the full impact of a show when it's very, very crowded. Needless to say, the throngs of visitors made it challenging for Jamie, too. Back to the show!

I've never known much about de Kooning, except that he was from New York and painted abstracts. So I can't imagine a better way to experience a first solid encounter with the artist than with this sweeping retrospective, filled with over 200 pieces gathered from public institutions and private collectors around the world (thanks, David Geffen). Jamie's art teacher Scherezade Garcia, from the Parsons Pre-College Academy (don't you think they could come up with something less lofty to call an art class for 3rd-5th graders?), told me a emphatically and more than once that I should take Jamie to see the show.

Jamie's first New York Abstractionist painting

He's 8 years old, so it was as fun to spin around in circles and knock into people as it was to look at the painting "with four boobies!"  "Look, Mom, more boobies!" Sure enough, de Kooning's Woman series was there, and because I know nothing about his private life, they left me wondering what the story was behind the monster women in his life. Monstrous, twisted faces emerge from abstract nudes, all in a balanced cacophony of color, but nonetheless either frightening or comical, depending on the painting. The galleries kept opening up to other galleries, and when we entered the gallery with the abstracts from the mid-to-late 1960s, I felt I understood why Scherezade wanted Jamie to see the show. They're stunning, and I mean that in the true sense of the word, as it was literally difficult to pull my eyes from one painting to the next. I asked him what he thought about the last gallery, filled with his late paintings, suggesting to him that I thought they looked softer. "It's like he spent his life painting, and then he felt peaceful after he learned how to paint."

Back on the subway platform, we talked about the show, but it took awhile before he could stop using empty adjectives. "It was great... It was grand... It was wonderful..." Me: "But why was it wonderful?" "Because it was grand." "But what did you like about the paintings?" Jamie: "The boobies [insert 8-year-old boy laugh]." "But what else did you like about them?" [How annoying am I? Poor kid.] Finally: "He uses bigger brush strokes than Jackson Pollack, who just splashed the paint." That worked for me (sorry, Mr. Pollack), and made me especially grateful that we'd made the trek.

Shanti Ananda

This morning I looked for the faded scar between two fingers on my left hand, and was troubled to not be able to see it. If I pull the skin on the back of my hand tautly, I can at least imagine that it's still there, barely, a centimeter of white to remind me of being 12 or 13, a Plaza Rat hanging around daily on the Plaza in Santa Fe. Shanti Ananda, a sweet boy who I looked up to in an indescribable way when I was between 12 and 16 years old, passed away on December 31st after a sudden brain aneurysm, I learned through old friends on Facebook. That afternoon so many years ago, we'd played a game called bloody knuckles. We each held our hands out, while the other tried to swipe their opponent's hand with a metal comb, right in between their knuckles. I was on the losing end of that particular battle.

I can only speak of knowing Shanti for a small group of clustered (and very intense, formative) years in the early to mid 1980s, years that I believe launched us Plaza Rats into our true selves. His blonde mohawk and Ank necklace would appear on the Plaza every day after school, and everyone would light up. Despite the fact that we were all committing daily, crazy shenanigans together, I always felt safe when he was around. He gave the best hugs; this I remember after 25 years, and let me tell you, I'm sure I needed each and every one of them.

The image that I have seared into my mind that I can contribute to what will surely be a long littany of first and last impressions, is of Shanti strolling down one of the paths that lead to the center monument of the Plaza. There he is, adorned with his exterior palette of teen angst, with one exception; he also exudes a protective light, and his loyalty knows no bounds. If we're scaling the walls of the post office after school, we'll be safe because he's with us. If we're climbing through the tunnels of Heaven and Hell after school, we'll be safe, because Shanti's with us. If I'm sneaking into the Lensic up the fire escape, I'm safe because he's around somewhere; he always was. If Catherine and I are getting picked up from Crapshaw Junior High by older  kids, and Shanti's among them, we're safe because he's there. Thinking back, I think he had a gift for soaking up the burden of others' insecurities with a kind of precious and unconditional love. He listened, and he was a wise counselor.  The cast of characters that surrounded us in that time have left the long lasting memories of a beautiful and struggling lot.

Today is New Year's Day, and I took my son hiking down the Appalachian Trail at the Delaware Water Gap. The scene reminded me intensely of growing up in Santa Fe and taking drives up the mountain to hike at Big and and Little Tesuque. As Jamie and I scaled jagged, mossy rocks, appreciating the sounds of the rushing water and the sun shining, I thought of Shanti. I kept imagining him in his youth, because that's all I knew. He was beautiful and smiling, and his arms were outstretched in the way that I remember them. May you find peace, my old friend, and may your family find comfort in those  in-between spaces that loved ones leave behind when they leave too soon.

An Everlasting Meal

There's one book that's stood out to me in reviews this month, and after reading an excerpt I purchased a few copies to hand out to various extended family members who I still exchange with: An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace, by Tamar Adler, is a sort of cookbook, but more a collection of beautifully crafted essays harkening back to her biggest inspiration How to Cook a Wolf by M.K. Fisher, a book that explored rethinking  the meaning of food bounty during times of rationing.

I've only made my way through the first half of the book (hanging off every word), but I can already tell that this will be one of those books I keep nearby and reach for often, just as I do Simplicity From A Monastery Kitchen (which I realize I borrowed from my mom something like 7 years ago)... I have grown to adore this monk who writes about lovage the way others write about love.

For Tamar, first thing's first: boil a pot of water and make it salty. Once you get that going you'll figure out what goes into it. Second: Purchase and roast loads of in-season vegetables at the top of your week. Save all cut stems, onion peels, cores, leafy tops, and other produce castings. Save the water from the vegetables and pasta you boil, and use it as a base for  soups.  Pickle onion peels and beets and toss them on top of frittatas, another great template for re-imagining the cycles of cooking that build on one another. I cook in a pretty judicious way anyhow, and am fairly creative with leftovers, but keeping cooked rice on hand for no other reason to know that someone will, at some point, be hungry, seems quite clever, if not like obvious common sense. Old rice makes the best fried rice, and fried rice is perfect for those odds and ends, and while you're at it, take the old rice/ polenta/ pasta, and make a curry at weeks' end out of the mish-mash. Make these things the center of your meal, and get creative about salads, which of course are not always made from "astronaut bags of lettuce."  I hate making salad, so therefore I don't eat enough of it. However, tonight I grabbed an apple, two little pears, and a sad, spare stalk of celery. I chopped up everything and tossed it with cracked pepper, rosemary vinegar, and good olive oil. To brighten it, I squeezed on it lemon juice and tossed in a handful of chopped parsley. I think Adler would approve of this; even more for saving the vinaigrette which fell to the bottom of the bowl, which will spruce up rice at some point in the next day or so.

So it looks like one of my copies will be hanging back with me. I might replace it with two more to give away before the week is out.

On Top of the Empire State

For years, I've found reasons why it's not a good time to take Jamie on top of the Empire State Building. It's too crowded; too expensive; we might run into King Kong; who knows? But last weekend, the opportunity presented itself in a way where everything clicked. It was Friday and Jamie had the day off from school. The weather was warm, and we were two blocks away after catching a matinee of the Muppets. Out came the question I've heard so many times before: "Can we go to the Empire State Building? I was born here, and I've never even been on top of it." Jim and I looked at each other, shrugged our shoulders, and I said "Sure, why not?" The look of unbridled joy on my kid's face because he thought he was hearing things-- "She said Yes?" --was worth the hefty ticket price to the 86th floor.

Toward the Southern Tip of Manhattan

Before the ascent, we were greeted by various tour guys trying to sell us tickets for joint bus trips before we had a chance to hit the box office. No, thanks. We were invited to purchase a map so we could know what we were looking at. No, thanks. We know what we're looking at. In short lines I heard several languages, not surprising. We were officially tourists in our own town.

I have been to the top, but not for close to twenty years, if my sketchy memory serves me correctly. The ear-popping trip up the elevator didn't take long at all, and once we were outside, the views were staggering. Visibility was excellent, and we could see up the Hudson to the Palisades, down the island to our block, East 4th Street, which was marked by the relatively new Cooper Square Hotel. We saw every bridge crossing the East River, and the Intrepid perched upon the Hudson. The Hearst Tower was easy to spot with its diagrid triangular facade, and Central Park served up fall's fading colors in a wash of earth tones. The Flatiron Building stood confidently with its narrow facade, where Broadway and 5th Avenue part ways. The archaic-looking wooden water towers speckled the rooftops, daring one to figure out which decade we're in.

Jamie was thrilled that he could poke his hand through the fence and hang it off the building. He spotted things that we hadn't: the Macy's windows we had just walked past; tour buses with people's heads popping out; tiny bicycles. He was so excited that vocalizations brimmed over, sheer joy pouring out of him.

The best part about it, aside from the obvious part of spending the afternoon with my guys on top of the Empire State Building, was looking down on this perfect city, all of its daily imperfections wiped away by a swath of broad sight lines. It's everyone's city to carve out a life as they wish, whether by luck or hard work or simple circumstance, and it can change on a dime from moment to moment, as fast as the clouds' shadows pour across Central Park before trolling up the Hudson. It's a dear old friend that I cling to, and every once it awhile it deserves a proper visit.

Cecil Beaton: The New York Years

Tuesday marked the last day of my Fall semester classes, and to change it up my fashion students and I went to see the "Cecil Beaton: The New York Years" show at the Museum of the City of New York. Beaton, a British born photographer and designer, was shooting portraits of Hollywood greats during its nacent 1920s and into the 60s (including the one of Ms. Monroe, above), many of them in his New York apartment. We see the Astaires yucking it up, a perfect young Marlon Brando, Hepburn in his "My Fair Lady" designs, among others.

Young Brando Avec Moi

My class had been to one other exhibit this semester at ICP, the Harper's Bazaar show, and found it lackluster at best. So this was a bang-up change from that. In fact, everything lousy about that show that my student Julia complained about on the Parsons blog was the polar opposite here. The work was arranged subject by subject, which made it easy to follow and absorb. The curatorial design was stunning, and incorporated Beaton's own designs; the Beaton-inspired wallpaper alone garnered a collective swoon upon entering the passageway that leads to the show. There were costumes on display from his opera years (La Traviata!), and fashion illustrations with swatches of fabric adhered to them, which two of my cooing students noticed and loved.

Beaton was interested in fame, and apparently donned a phony and exaggerated Hollywood accent. It's no surprise that he was longtime pals with Truman Capote, who he began to resent when In Cold Blood propelled Capote's fame far out of orbit from his own. It's also no surprise that he found himself in the company of Andy Warhol shooting his factory scene. If I close my eyes, I can pluck Beaton from one of his self-portraits and hear him say "Can-dy, Dahhlling."

This museum is such a quiet treasure in our city. If you go, be sure to check out another room or two. I paused for a long time at the Stettheimer dollhouse, which includes, among other treasures, a miniature wall hanging from the sisters' friend Marcel Duchamp. I've only been to MCNY a handful of times in my years in New York, and rather than mourn the shows I've missed I make a promise to myself to check in more frequently.

French and Japanese Brain Scramble

There are words and phrases that I find myself uttering to myself in French when I'm walking down the street. I love the sounds of these words, no matter the meaning. A satisfying "maintenant"[mant-en-o] only means "now", but when I'm walking down the streets of New York in the rain, looking up at the half-obscured-by-fog Empire State Building, carrying a big orange umbrella, saying "maintenant"gives me a staccato walking rhythm that carves the perfect path home. So does the act of conjugating my elementary verbs: Je vais, tu vas, il va, elle va [for some reason, a deep pause here before continuing with] nous allons, vous allez, ils vont, elles vont. I like thinking about which mono-syllabic sound goes with which form of the verb. Add to that the verbs etre, faire, and avoir, and you have the crux of my final exam coming up. Actually, that's just a fraction of my final coming up, but c'est la vie. Phrases like "j'adore Professeur Samuel" are coupled with "je suis tres fatigue apres mon cours de Francais." I'm still totally screwed up with my articles [de + le = du, but not always; past participle of etre is eu, etc. etc.], but to me it doesn't matter so much, because to be able to utter "apres mon cours" --after my course-- is a lovely thing. "Boite de nuit" means nightclub, and its literal translation is "box of night." How pretty is that? Box of night.

And then there's the Japanese coming up in the written portion of my blue belt test on Saturday, but that's just a series of body parts and movements. Shotei (palm); sutko (knife foot); shuto satkutsu uchi komi (knife hand strike to face); kensetsu geri (sp?, sideways joint kick to knee).

Next Friday marks the official end of my semester. Cinema et livre date avec moi, moi, et moi!

World AIDS Day

Sometimes it seems like an entire lifetime has passed between my first awareness of HIV and today. Today I woke up and remembered that it's December 1, and a flood of memories came crashing down on me, most strongly what my first introduction to what AIDS was. A history teacher at my little high school in Santa Fe had gotten very sick. He was short and adorable with a ring of grey hair, and soft spoken. He wore tweed. During a school assembly he was led by the arm down the middle aisle to the front of the auditorium, where he gave his illness a name. I'm sure that most of us hadn't heard of AIDS then; I certainly had not. Shortly afterward, a friend's father perished from pneumonia-related causes.

When I first moved to Chelsea in January, 1993, it was still possible to identify the walking sick and dying population. Those who were inflicted often wore a ghostly pallor and were rail thin. My apartment was three blocks from ground zero of the AIDS crisis, of course St. Vincent's Hospital, and this was a daily vision of sadness. It was nearly impossible to walk past the little white building on West 12th Street, with the circular windows, and not imagine the horror and sadness unfolding inside. When did the cocktail kick in that began to protect them?

Last Thursday night, Community Board 2 passed a near-unanimous resolution to create the first official AIDS Memorial Park at the sight of the current St. Vincent's Triangle Park, right on Greenwich and 7th Avenue. I can think of a no more appropriate place to meditate and remember what the neighborhood used to look like, and who used to populate it-- New York alone lost 100,000 people. This is a day to raise awareness about the ongoing AIDS crisis, but today my thoughts are hanging on to those who are missed dearly from our streets.

Black Friday, Indeed

I was so lucky that growing up I was taught to be frugal, use what we had, and not pine (too much) for that which we didn't have. We struggled financially, but we never went hungry, and most of all, we were loved "to the moon and back." I'm so grateful for that, because from that consistent heartbeat of my childhood I know I have the tools and resources to pass those values along to my own child.

Thanksgiving. It's a time of reflection-- of gratitude for health and home, family and friends. It's also a time of decision making. Do what your country tells you to do: shop, shop hard, shop fierce, shop often. Shop on Thanksgiving Eve, Thanksgiving Day, the day after. Cyber Monday, countdown to Christmas, shop shop shop.

Every year the Christmas music starts seeping into our consciousness earlier and earlier; this year I heard Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer in a Rite-Aid before Halloween. Certainly, we are in a struggling economy and the stores are doing whatever they can to lure in shoppers' tight holiday budgets. This year, I have a particularly strong wave of disgust for the new lengths the box-shops are going to in order to get to the consumers first-- even if it means making your staff go to work on Thanksgiving, since apparently Black Friday now begins on Thursday (or a week ago, were you to see all the junk mail piling up in my gmail inbox). The media manages to support this frenzy. They find the box-store employees who are obviously happy for the overtime that will show up in their paychecks (presumably so they can shop), and you hear the soundbites of their refrains over and over again: "I'm one of the lucky ones, I have a job." Well, I hope you don't get trampled by the onslaught of "consumers" as they barrel down your doors at midnight, before their turkey is fully digested.

I'm sitting this one out. I've felt the fever before. I've wanted to hit the stores and find those deals. Who doesn't want to be done with their Christmas shopping early and spend less money doing so? You probably have the day off, so what else is a better thing to do besides get out and there and shop? Go shopping! Now! Some of you will go shopping, and I implore you that if you do decide to go shopping on Black Friday, consider your personal decision making process. Pick one indie business and spread your budget to the David's of the Perpetual Holiday Season David and Goliath fight. Should I spend money at Dinosaur Hill on East 9th Street, the toy shop that gives Jamie a little yoyo on Halloween since he was a baby trick or treating (and whose owner remembers his name), or Wal-Mart because it's a "steal"? Steal is a good word for it. The frenzy threatens to steal your quaint Main Streets; take away your valuable family time; put you into a debt cycle that is nearly impossible to break free from.

Take a hike. Read a book. Do nothing. Volunteer yourself to simplicity, and the rewards are far greater than what's in the bag.

Just the Right Book

It feels good to showcase an indie bookstore company, Just the Right Book, right before the official Holiday Shopping season begins. Oh wait, it began before Halloween this year, didn't it?

My feature that's on Publishing Perspectives today is about a creative bookseller named Roxanne Coady who launched a new business model online-- matching readers to books based on human to human customer service. Not eBooks, not discounted books... just books.

It was a pleasure to talk to Roxanne and learn about a self-imposed exile she gave herself from her bookstore four years back. She left the shop in capable hands and embarked on an 8-week journey interviewing people in the book business, from other bookstore owners to the heads of all of the big publishing houses to Ron Johnson, the visionary designer behind the first Apple store. Click here to learn about how those conversations reshaped the philosophy of her business practices.

New Museum: Carsten Höller

This weekend, we had a spontaneous opportunity to join old friends at the Carsten Höller: Experience exhibit at the New Museum, just a short walk from our apartment. On the surface, it seemed like something that kids would love: an interactive show with a giant slide, carousels, fish tanks and strobe lights. Visitors may enter a giant slide on the 4th floor of the building, zoom down two stories, and exit from the 2nd floor where they will be dumped into a room filled with strobe lights and fluorescent sculpture animals lurking around the floor. A blue chimp here; a pink alligator there. My friend Mary opted to cuddle for a moment with the blue chimp... I opted to stick my head into a head-shaped glass bubble inside of a fish tank, as did Jamie, which I began to regret when he started throwing up the next morning. All those people sticking their heads in there, gack...

This is how the New Museum summarizes the show: "Taken as a whole, Höller’s work is an invitation to re-imagine the way in which we move through the world and the relationships we build as he asks us to reconsider what we think we know about ourselves."

This is how I summarize the "Experience" show: The New Museum gets a big Fail for not managing crowds in more efficient way. If you head over on the weekend, be prepared to stand in three lines that are each no less than a half hour: line to get in; line for wristbands which you must be wearing to get in the lines for the carousel and the slide. And you must wear them, or you'll be asked to get off of the carousel at the midway point, as Jamie was because his mom didn't know she needed to stand in line for a wristband after paying the entrance fee. Really? Kick a kid off of a very slow moving carousel when he had like 4 seconds left to go? Fail! Three hour wait for the slide? Really? What's the hold up, you ask? Grownups being coached on wearing helmets and sliding down slides.

Also, if a child walks up to a giant vat of empty gelatin pills that's part of the exhibit, maybe the security guard standing there shouldn't hand him a pill so he can run up to his mommy holding the empty capsule and argue "But a man with a name tag gave it to me! He's giving them to everyone!" My bad for having him out of eyesight for five seconds flat. Was it the strobe lights that threw me off my game?

For some, this show will be the pinacle of a mind-altering and experimental hallucinogen-inspired experience. So don't be put off by my crankiness; just plan to go during the week when it's not so crowded. Or hit a playground and experience a slide immediately. Teardrop Park down in the Battery has an impressive one, and you don't need to put on a helmet and sign a waiver to go down the thing.

Third Grade Bliss: The First Field Trip

Today I was treated to a third grade field trip. Mr. Mattson, 19 kids, and 8 parents walked the 8 blocks to the Spring Street Firehouse Museum. The museum was chock full of cool stuff that threw me into the depths of New York City history in a far stronger way than I imagined it would while crossing 7th Avenue South with so many squirming kids. Turns out, the treasures were indisputable: painstakingly preserved hand-painted helmets from the 1800s; embroidered belts used for fancy dress during parades; original buckets used in the first "bucket brigades"; stovetop hats for helmets? Really?

The Firemen that run the museum were walking history books and knew how to tap into the kids' collective mentality without blinking an eye. The class sat for a video about fire safety (um, I will be doing a fire drill and checking the batteries in my fire alarms, which everyone should be changing twice a year, "when you change your clocks", according to Mr. Eddie, retired Fire Lt.? Colonel? Captain?). Then they got to go inside of a fake apartment where they identified all kinds of unsafe things, including space heaters near billowy curtains and irons plugged in near bathtubs. From there, they got to make their way through a real fake fire made from a heavy fog that had somehow been emitted into the atmosphere! They dropped to their knees and crawled along the perimeter of the room until they found their way to the exit. Once out, they stayed at their designated "meeting place", which we should all also determine in our own personal fire plans.

The history of urban life can be seen in the progression of the fire trucks themselves. We moved from the first Bucket Brigades to hand pumps drawn by horses; moved from steam controlled pumps to, finally, trucks with engines. There was even a gorgeous carriage stamped with "Steinway" that Mr. Steinway himself had commissioned to protect his early workers in his Queens piano factory.

The charmer of the day was the stuffed dog "Chief" who was taken into a firehouse and wormed his way first into the hearts of the firemen, then onto the trucks, and finally, into the fires themselves where he rescued animals and people alike. A real canine hero (shown above). In the same room was a painting of three firefighters who lost their lives in a rudimentary house fire on Watt Street in 1994. A woman had carelessly let a bag of groceries fall onto her stove. The man in the middle was Mr. Mattson's High School football coach, and it being a Catholic School, he paused to say a Hail Mary with the children for his lost mentor.

This was just a precursor to further tragedy: the 9/11 room honored the 343 firemen who lost their lives on that day, in a 102-minute period, a fact I hadn't known so specifically before. The photography of that day surrounded an arched memorial, which featured faces of all of the fallen. Most moving of all was the uniform of Father Judge, which hung behind glass, still covered in soot. From the fire safety education to the history to the remembrance of lost heroes, this field trip packed a wallop of an impact.

Learning French

I'm blogging less because I'm sitting in a French class for four hours a week. Literally. Both classes are held entirely in French, and I'm getting to the point where I can understand most of what Professeur Samuel is saying (j'adore Professeur Samuel); responding to him without freezing first is another story altogether. I lose my confidence when I have to conjure the correct articles and verbs. Verb endings aren't that horrible right now; it's confusing etre (to be) and avoir (to have) constantly because the French use them differently than we do.

I can see that my hurdles of speaking are largely around the thinking process-- I try to translate English into French, word for word, as I speak, and it just doesn't work that way. The article usages are completely different. You aren't cold; you have cold. You aren't tired; you have tired. Or something like that.

The other problem is that I need to hit the books more. I feel like the time I've given over to learning French has been a generous four hours a week, but that's not enough. I need to compound it. The best I felt in class was when I had class on a Tuesday, came home, watched a film in French with English subtitles, and went back to class on Thursday. That was slightly more immersion.

The scope of the idiomatic underbelly of the language is extremely daunting. I remember thinking I'd never crack the surface when my friend Jenn explained to me that I was a little chicken, and that was a term of affection that women called one another. Ma petite poulet? Or is it mon? Because the masculine and feminine are a whole other wrench thrown in. I'm hoping that this part of it becomes second nature after I take the clues that the language can give to me; certain endings are always masculine, certain endings are always feminine, and there are exceptions for every rule.

I guess we're mired in our own abundance of idioms. I consider this as it's raining cats and dogs outside of my window. Or as Jim snores like a train in the other room. Or Jamie tries to read his book until the cows come home when it's time to hit the sack. I'm climbing a huge mountain, but shall persevere.

Social Media as Art

On Thursday me and my Word City Studio collaborator Kathleen Sweeney went to check out an exhibit at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea about social media. This is how the gallery summarized their show, which closed on Saturday: "An exhibition investigating the ways in which contemporary artists approach public platforms of communication and social networks through an aesthetic and conceptual lens and examining the cumulative effects of social media on our daily lives."

To be fair, it's accurate that it was an investigation of how artists are incorporating social networking into their lives. The possibilities are as endless as the infinite Twitter feed, and most effective to me was a collection of thermal printers hung from the wall with a constant stream of twitter feeds that were in their wholeness a study of how emotion moves through the electronic ether (the paper mess of it is shown above). Overall, the artists communed on the theme of pulling together collections of words/ collections of images/ collections of Google Searches to illustrate greater happenings of our collective consciousness. A wall of sunset images from Flickr (?); a study of the emotional peaks and valleys of emotional expression across the span of a lifetime (20 somethings tweet about connectivity and isolation, while people over 50 tend to feel blessed about their worldly and unworldly accumulations).

I left the exhibit feeling empty. It seemed to me that everything was so parceled out, broken down and abstract that I couldn't reach in and pull out anything human and real. Makes me want to ditch social media for awhile and call a real person on the telephone where our concerns can't be captured and tampered with and manipulated beyond, "Wow, it's just really great to see you."

Thanks, Momosyllabic!

It's an honor to have had my essay "Robot Moms in the Closet", which was published in the eAnthology Welcome to My World, reviewed by a fellow blogger, Antje Rauwerda. Antje also contributed an essay, and blogs over at Momosyllabic.blogspot.com. My desire to clone myself over and over again in order to tend to any task, person, or role in life, resonated with her. If there could be an Army of Rachels, why not an Army of Antjes?

I have to admit, it's deeply gratifying to know that my writing isn't being swallowed up by a big vacuum, vortex, or black hole. It mattered to someone and made her feel better about her own ability to cope (or not) at any given time. In my essay I spoke candidly about treating depression. To have this mean something to another mother makes the vulnerability of this disclosure fall away. Though I don't believe there should be a stigma for such self-care, I still fall prey to the occasional self-deprecation over why I can't tackle everything on my own, all the time, every single minute of the day. When I try to tell myself "I'm better" and can end treatment, the bad end of my emotional cycles comes whooshing back to remind me that I'm better off with therapy and closely monitored medication. From a parenting perspective, this means I've been able to make good and thoughtful decisions instead of rash and reactive ones. I've had to fight the good fight in a few areas, and frankly at times it's exhausting: legally, with the Board of Ed for Jamie's education; legally, with a deadbeat magazine that doesn't like to pay writers; and even with my own physical health, which requires monthly monitoring and blood work to manage my blood clotting disorder. Mama's need help sometimes, and it's okay to ask for it.

Thank you, sweet Antje!