Leesburg Essay 6

Alex

I meant to publish this essay before we took our trip to New Jersey at the end of July, but everything ground to a halt when we received George’s sister Alex’s jaw-dropping news that she has lung cancer. (She was and is a non-smoker. They don’t call New Hampshire the Granite State for nothing, however, which makes my EPA-molded mind think of radon gas. They are having their water tested, although their air is apparently negative.) She is now receiving chemotherapy treatment and we all continue to pray for her recovery.

Summer

The 4th of July is a big event in our neighborhood because you can see the Leesburg fireworks show from the field behind our house and from many of the backyards. In addition, a couple of families set off their own fireworks in our cul-de-sac. This year two of our neighbors had parties preceding the show, and as usual Alexander and his friends moved like a pack of wild beasts from one to the other and then back to the field to watch the fireworks, although I suspect there was a lot more playing with the colored glow sticks and running around than actual viewing. Nora went to sleep for a while and then woke up screaming when the first big BOOM hit at about 9:30. It was akin to when we were in Florida at Cheryl’s house and Nora fell out of Annaliese’s bed and actually rolled underneath, leaving her trapped and screaming in the dark.

Unfortunately, it was storming for a good part of the 4th, and the storms were big enough, with threatened tornadoes, that the U.S. Park Police evacuated the Capitol mall a couple of hours before D.C.’s big fireworks show started. I can’t imagine evacuating all those people (they reportedly put some of them in the Smithsonian museums). Getting in and out of D.C. on the 4th is an event in itself. The Metro trains become so jammed that you’re packed in the cars with hundreds of people and panicking because you can’t get out at your stop unless you’re right near the doors. Or, you’re standing on the platforms watching train after train go by. Forget driving. Many people try to watch from the Arlington side. Other lucky people have access to rooftops in downtown D.C. I remember for a couple of years just deciding to forget the whole transportation thing altogether and walk back to Virginia.

We had a good trip to my parents’ house in Tennessee at the end of June. Alexander invented a game with an elaborate set up of chairs and pillows which at its core involved rolling a ball into a flower pot turned on its side. This he and my father played for hours, although the rules kept changing every round as Alexander served not only as player but ref as well. He also improved his pool game, although it is tough to play against someone who is too short to reach all the shots and has a rule applying only to him whereby he can move the cue ball around at will whenever he “can’t reach it.”

The car ride to Tennessee takes about nine hours when you factor in stops. We entertained ourselves for hours listening to children’s music that has become popular in our house—some of the best children’s music I’ve heard. The children’s author Sandra Boynton, who specializes in drawing stylized cows, pigs, and other cuddly animals, has teamed with a number of singers, songwriters, and even famous actors to create three CDs (titled “Philadelphia Chickens,” “Rhinoceros Tap,” and “Dog Train”) that are just a riot—really well orchestrated with amusing lyrics directed at both children and adults. I take great delight in songs like “I Need a Nap” (sung by Kate Winslet and Weird Al Yankovich), “Tantrum,” and “Faraway Cookies.” If you’re interested, check out Sandra Boynton’s website.

We returned from Florida in April with a new family member. Some of you may recall that my Aunt Marilu had a Maltese dog named Muki. Cheryl, who is a cat person and whose cat Max was not necessarily Muki’s best friend, asked if we were interested in taking Muki back with us and giving him a home where he would get more personalized attention. So, after some consideration, we stuffed him in a little carrier under my seat and flew back to Leesburg with him.

George was horrified at the prospect of owning a toy dog, more akin to a stuffed animal than an actual dog, maybe, and there has been no end to the harassment he receives at work. For a while his coworkers reminded him every morning that he was now the proud owner of said stuffed animal. To make matters worse, Muki was immediately attached to me, much like my childhood dog Tish (a rather neurotic beagle mix) was immediately attached to my mother. It was clear, however, that when we went to Tennessee with Muki, and George came back after five days at home alone, Muki had actually missed him. (We speculated that maybe Muki thought “hmmm, if that guy can be abandoned, maybe I’m next…?”)

The kids have taken to Muki and regularly fight over who’s going to feed and walk him. Muki is slowly adjusting to life with two kids, lots of neighbors, and outdoor activities (my aunt didn’t let him out by himself because she was worried that he would be eaten by coyotes). The fenced-in yard helps; it’s his own territory where he’s not bothered by kids or other annoying creatures. I’m convinced that the reason the bunnies haven’t come and eaten my pumpkin plant (which is out there right now moving hugely and menacingly toward my slow-growing witch hazel shrub) or my tiny spinach and tomato plants is that the dog has been marking his territory. I’m sure he’s not nearly as clean as he was when he lived with Aunt Marilu. In addition, clay soil + white dog = pinkish dog.

The kids keep asking if we can get a bird or a fish as well. I told them I have no interest in a bird, and we’ll have to wait until everybody’s older and can help clean the fish tank before I’ll be willing to get one (although I love them). But Nora really upped the ante when she asked if I could move out of the house so that she, Alexander, and Daddy could get a cat.

We are also to receive another life-altering inheritance from my family in the form of a piano. Jolie’s mother recently downsized from her house and can no longer keep the piano. It was originally my grandmother’s; Jolie’s mother took it when my grandmother moved from her house. It is a baby grand, which means that it needs to stand away from the wall. If you have seen our house, you’ll understand why we couldn’t accept the piano without thinking hard about where to put it. We continue to weigh our options (i.e., high humidity upstairs vs. very cold and dry in the basement).

I’m hoping at least one of our children is interested in taking piano lessons. I took lessons for a number of years and can still pick out a tune if pressed (at least with the right hand). In addition, I love to listen to keyboard music—especially Bach. I get no credit for this from my parents who don’t really enjoy baroque music, but are big opera fans. My father says with regard to harpsichord music: “There’s a reason they invented the piano.” In addition, they seem to believe that I remain trapped in my teenage years and listen only to Bruce Springsteen, the Police, and U2 (see below). As for a piece of trivia that won’t likely help you on any game shows, Alexander was born to the sound of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In contrast, when Nora was born there was no music playing, just the sound of the Russian-German nurse yelling at me. That’s probably why Nora has a slightly hysterical side even today.

Alexander managed to graduate from kindergarten and will start in first grade, presumably, after Labor Day. This means a full day of school for him, which disturbs him because he says that he wants to eat lunch at home with me and Nora. My mother reminded me that I ate lunch at home until I started junior high in seventh grade. Nora starts preschool two mornings in the middle of September. She may like St. John’s a lot, particularly because she’ll be going to school like Alexander does (although there’s no bus, just Mommy). She also likes the preschool’s signature purple t-shirt. Currently, however, she’s in a MOM MOM MOM stage, which shows no sign of abating, making it difficult to picture dropping her off at school.

For Mother’s Day this year Alexander told George that he wanted to cook for me and I shouldn’t do any cooking all day; his plan was to get ice-cream cake from our local ice-cream shop and then, for the main meal, “cook some tomatoes” (he’s well aware of my aversion to raw tomatoes). George and I managed to convince him that it would be better to wait until we had our own tomatoes fresh from the garden. Mother’s Day, of course, is not a big holiday for Alexander. Not like Easter, which he associates with being able to eat dessert (i.e., Easter candy) after breakfast. In June he had a big night out with Felicie and Greg when they took him camping in Shenandoah National Park. He was very excited about sleeping in the tent and toasting marshmallows over the fire, but then he discovered he didn’t really like them toasted and consumed about ten of them unadorned for dessert. Seems to me he’s ripe for the raw food movement.

Alexander played t-ball this spring for the Leesburg “River Dogs” and wants to play coach-pitch in the fall. When I signed him up I thought I was doomed to hours of dusty practices with crying five year olds—I’m not a fan of baseball—but thankfully George stepped up to the plate and went to most of the games and practices. He found solace from boredom analyzing the coach’s approach. One practice that I attended late one Friday afternoon was my worst nightmare. It was 90-plus degrees, I was terribly allergic to the field, and my eyes were running all over the place. I had to borrow another mom’s eye drops (don’t try this at home) so that I could see to drive home.

Recently I spoke with a friend of George’s and mine from grad school and he was shocked literally speechless to hear that George had been going to games. This mutual friend (sports obsessed, particularly with regard to ice hockey) immediately suggested that he had some books that might be of interest to George, including one on the economics of baseball. I think it’s pushing it just a bit to think that George is going to start reading books about baseball, especially those one step removed from the actual sport.

I was struck recently by Alexander’s resemblance to the kind of modern performance artist that constructs installations in outdoor spaces or museums. Often, when I walk around my home I must navigate furniture and toys, rearranged into patterns and constructions, clubhouses, or sometimes obstacle courses for his friends—and now Nora’s beginning to do the same. Some remain in place for weeks, and I just get used to walking around them. Then something changes, I sense a subtle shift in the air, and I’m thrown completely off balance.

Band-Aid Update

What is it with kids and band-aids? Why are they such a source of terror? Both my kids become completely unhinged if they have a band-aid on and someone talks casually about taking if off, or brushes against it, or puts soap on it in the bath. As soon as the band-aid is off, all is well, but until then it’s as though they have some giant blood-sucking leech attached to them that they’re afraid to disturb. Anyone know the Greek word for fear of band-aids?

Praise Update

George has noted that a lot of the new (young, just-out-of-grad-school) hires at work seemed to require constant praise and feedback in order to function and he wonders where this is coming from. I’ve noticed that kids’ toys and books, unlike the ones that were around when we were kids, are constantly telling them that they’ve done a good job at this or that, even at the most mundane things. (“Yeah!, you got up off the floor!! Good job!!”) Even Dora the Explorer provides continuous feedback to the reader/viewer. (“Great Job! You’ve helped us stop Swiper!!”) I imagine that this is partly the result of the movement to ensure that kids have high “self-esteem,” but how is it creating self-esteem if people constantly need someone else to tell them that they’ve done a good job?

Media Update

In my last essay I wrote about actors that I like; as a corollary I thought I’d note the ones whose popularity leaves me mystified. On the male side the primary culprit is Matthew McConaughey, who seems to exist only in the gym, on the beach with his shirt off, and surfing through a few silly movies. On the female side I have to go with Cameron Diaz, with the exception of her role in “In Her Shoes” alongside Toni Collette, which was better than it had any right to be. I discovered a “new” actress, however, when I saw Naomi Watts in “21 Grams,” paired with a mystifyingly hairless (although he had all sorts of hair on his actual head) Sean Penn. We also caught her in the highly stylized latest version of “King Kong,” which is so over the top that it requires an additional suspension of disbelief above and beyond the normal suspension of disbelief required to watch a movie about a giant rampaging ape.

We both liked “Little Miss Sunshine” and I was glad to see Greg Kinnear again, who was a big asset to the fabulous “As Good As it Gets.” We both loved “Casino Royale”—unlike typical Bond flicks, the Bond girl, played by Eva Green, was no hyper-glandular bikini-clad airhead, which appealed to me. (As a result, she may have appealed less to George.) We actually walked out of the previous Bond movie, which we saw in Germany, because it was so bad. George reluctantly watched “Walk the Line” with me, which is the story of Johnny and June Carter Cash. The movie was pretty good, but I sat there the whole time thinking “I hate this music.”

George had unique George-like reactions to several movies we saw. I liked “Brokeback Mountain” a lot and I thought the two leads were really impressive. What George got out of it were some reflections regarding alternative careers: maybe he could be a rodeo clown, or maybe a shepherd? The movie “Kinsey” led George, who does statistics for a living (as opposed to what he’d be doing in his alternative careers, as noted above), to rant and rave about the shoddy methods employed by Kinsey, whose questionable statistics are still cited today at though they are legitimate. He found that he could really relate to “The Devil Wears Prada,” as the boss portrayed in the movie reminded him quite frighteningly of his boss in Berlin, who employed similar sadistic methods to “encourage” performance from his staff.

We watched the first season of the HBO show called “The Wire,” which is the story of a group of cops investigating a group of drug dealers in Baltimore. At first, we, even as veterans of "The Sopranos" (the last episode of which left George enraged and me convinced that Tony had been whacked), couldn’t believe how gratuitously raw the dialogue was. Once we got used to it (or maybe it was toned down?) we actually enjoyed the show.

HBO aired a special recently that featured a comedy award to Jerry Seinfeld. Several other comedians were on hand to provide the requisite insults and banter and at the conclusion he gave a brief speech that was very funny. It’s been years since I really watched a comedian do stand up. There are (or were) several comedy clubs in D.C. that I went to with friends years ago, and they were a lot of fun—although expensive because they had a cover charge and two-drink minimum. The quality of the comedians, however, seemed to decline as the evening wore on (or maybe the quality of the audience as they downed their two-plus drinks). What I’ve noticed about many comedians is that, unless you agree with their politics, they’re not that funny. They seem angry or just really obvious. It seems to me that a good comedian should be able to entertain even if the audience members don’t agree with him or her. Chris Rock, for example, always makes me laugh.

We managed to catch all but one episode of that great series “Planet Earth” from the Discovery Channel. Well, great except that I could have done without Sigourney Weaver constantly reminding us how innovative the technology was. I took away two main messages from this program. (1) I have filed many things I used to know away somewhere in the upper reaches of my brain, to be removed and have the dust blown off them at some future date. For example, until I had children, there were many years in which the word “tadpole” did not cross my mind. (2) There are a lot of flora and fauna out in the world that are clearly freaks of nature, displaying clear impediments to existence and serious design flaws. Not just those fish featured in “Planet Earth” that spend their entire lives attached to rocks underneath flowing water, either. The list of the questionable includes such familiar things as panda bears, peonies, Muki, and elephants, which have skin so dry it hurts to look at them (a bit like contemplating the universe, which has always made my head hurt). And who was the first person to decide to use the nest of a cave-dwelling bird to make soup? The best part of the series, however, was the mating dance of the bird of paradise, which has to be one of the more over-the-top displays in the animal kingdom (and never before captured on film, as Sigourney so helpfully reminded us), and the poor bird-guy (WARNING: SPOILER FOLLOWS) got rejected by his would-be mate in the end. Nature can be so cruel.

Print Media Update

The June issue of Vanity Fair magazine—a publication with which I have a definite love-hate relationship—features a bunch of different cover photographs arranged by Bono (of U2 fame) to highlight his interest in African development. I’ve always admired Bono, in large part because he always seems to be able to leave aside ideological tirades and try to work with everyone from all sides. (Didn’t he at one point take Jesses Helms to Africa?) He apparently decided to include a photo of Bush and Condi Rice on one of the Vanity Fair covers, despite the hatred that Graydon Carter (Vanity Fair’s blowhard editor) has for Bush, because Bono says that Bush has actually been very good on African issues. Bono is one celebrity that I admire for his statements on social issues. Plus, I’ve loved U2’s music ever since their first album was released when I was in high school. A little on the weirder side, there’s a church in Ireland or somewhere in the U.K. that has decided to hold services featuring U2’s music. Check out the website if you're interested in how Bono’s “Project Red” for Africa initiative works.

The Economist magazine has come out with a great enhancement to its subscription service—a downloadable audio version. It was introduced not without a couple of glitches, however, as there were all sorts of initial problems with the downloading. George was happy to hear that the reporters doing the reading were actually British, which adds an illusion of seriousness. The problem, though, is that the readers don’t seem to get that much guidance or time to practice between the final editing of the magazine and the recording of the audio version and, as a result, they mangle almost every non-Anglo name. This may be understandable when wrestling with a difficult language like Hungarian, or one seeming to include only consonants, such as Polish, but less so when dealing with such commonly heard names as “Jorge.”

Recently we gave some money to the “Grant Monument Association,” which seeks to preserve the memorial to President Ulysses S. Grant in upper Manhattan (a member of George’s extended family is a descendent of Grant). In return, we received a thank-you note from the association that we decided had to be the best letter George had ever received.

DailyKos Update

Finally, inspired by the DailyKos website, my favorite liberal blog, a question to ponder: at what point do actual people become caricatures, or when do people who take themselves seriously begin to sound like something out of “The Onion”? Take, for example, the following write-up introducing a presumably activist theologian:

“Eco-justice theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher interprets the Bible from an environmental, African-American, and womanist perspective. In her book Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit: Womanist Wordings on God and Creation, she celebrates both traditional nature and urban nature as part of God's creation. ‘We are responsible for giving life back to that which has given us life—God and the elements of our planet,’ she writes.”