Adventures in the Pointless Forest

"Mumbangha" means "umbrella," obviously.

Merry Christmas, if you like Christmas. Bearable Sunday to you, otherwise.

Jane is napping, my mother is napping, and Steve and I are nestled all snug on the sofa being kept warm by our portable computing devices. The earlier part of the day was an orgy of piddly plonkety plinkity plong as Jane made full and festive use of her new avant garde art music toy piano, alternating with bouts of watching as much Shaun the Sheep as her greedy little heart desired.

Later we will go to our usual Christmas night party, featuring a fine and motley buffet of more or less seasonal foods, hours of singing, and a musical saw.

Earlier in the week we went on a date, not alas to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as we had planned--damn you, limited release dates--but a date nonetheless. As usual, we found that not fifteen minutes into our time as two adults alone doing adult things with only adults, we were mutually compelled to break out in a fugue of Janeisms.

"Nut? Nut?"

"Mook, peese."

"Cheese pie! Yeah? Yes. Yessss."

"Mook? Cake? Kiki? Yes. Cankoo."

"Mumbangha."

"Yeah-yeah? Nooo, me me it mine."

I'm glad we took advantage of this opportunity to have a really sound conversation about serious intellectual topics. No doubt the people at the next table were, too.

Trees.

My mother came to visit and it was swell. Not only is she wildly entertaining company (at least when she is not keeling over from jetlag induced sudden exhaustion), she also claimed that visiting us was "like staying at a lovely spa."

This is (a) perhaps the thing a houseguest could say that is most perfectly designed to delight and flatter me, and of course (b) utter bollocks. I am not familar with any lovely spas that feature toddlers who scream like they are being tortured when you try to put them to bed ten minutes before they are ready and steal your iPhone between times, or staff who explain to you just how HARD it is to walk as SLOWLY as you do, with your dodgy knees, as they force you to walk all the way across town for the third time that day. 

But maybe you know one like that. Is it the best ever? It is probably the best ever.

In addition to putting up with our nonsense and calling it restorative, my mother also performed a grandparental babysitting feat more wonderful than I could have imagined. Wrestling a screaming child into bed so that we could go see Contagion and eat artfully prepared food was excellent, without a doubt, but the mindblowingly brilliant bit was the mornings.

Being an early riser ordinarily and on east coast time to boot, she was awake bright and early every day. And so, when Jane woke with her habitual aggreived creaky door noises and requests for cheese (chizsh! chizsh! chizsh! chizsh! chiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiizsh!) my wonderful, glorious, sainted mother would receive her happily and then CLOSE OUR BEDROOM DOOR so that we could roll over and go back to sleep. 

Also she accompanied me to a local nursery and engaged in what anyone else would certainly find mindnumbingly extended stints of lively conversation about my adorable new little trees: which to get, where to put them (here? no, how about two feet to the left? forward a bit? where the other one is? back over here?), how charming they were, how pleasing their containers, what other things would accompany them to best advantage et cetera et cetera oh trees.

Trees! They are rather fetching, aren't they?

Not having any decisive point to close on, I leave you with two views of Jane, the dignified:

and the somewhat less dignified:

There and back again

We went on so many planes! We went on planes and planes. And unlike everyone else in blizzard-riven America this week, we somehow got to go on planes that went where they were supposed to go at pretty much the time they were supposed to go there. For this I am extremely grateful.

The baby more or less acquiesced to all of this plane going, only dissolving into exhausted whimpers on the final leg of the trip home. Fortunately that was on a VERY LOUD variety of very small plane, and her defeated little sobs were barely audible over the vast

 

WHOOOOOOOOM

 

of the engines and propellers. About twenty minutes before we landed, she gave one last sad hurp and fell flat on her face into my armpit. There she partook of a sleep so profound that she regained all her good cheer and then some, far more than can be merited by any airport at ten at night, and giggled all the way through baggage claim.

Somewhere in a gap between all those plane flights we had Christmas. Merry Christmas! 

My ancestral home, unlike Southern California, has a winter. In winter you get to put your baby in ridiculous all-in-one fleecy garments.

For going outdoors she also had a hastily knit hat, because the hood of the above garment turned out to be more ornamental than practical. I was very proud of myself for realizing this before we got to the land of ice and cold, and for managing to produce a hat with the aforementioned necessary haste, all while watching The Bourne Identity the night before we left town. Competence! 

On Christmas Day my aunt impressed us all with her well preserved skill at shorthand, which she'd been taught back when it was a standard school course for adolescent girls. It's magic. It seems to me that there must be circumstances of some glamorous sort (haute espionage? delicate diplomacy?) for which discreet practitioners of the art are now highly sought after. Please tell me that this is true. I want very much for it to be true.

None of us did a Christmas tree this year, but there was an excellent trifle, which is all I really require of the season. Next year, when Jane is old enough to notice, I suppose we'll bestir ourselves a bit more in the directions of piney boughs and knit stockings. I did share my trifle with her, an event which inspired her to fling her limbs about in pure joy, like a tiny David Byrne. 

We saw wonderful old friends, went out for drinks twice, froze our ears half off (I didn't have sufficient haste to knit hats for us, just for the baby), went out to a film, exchanged many presents, ate lots of fantastic food, and watched the Doctor Who Christmas special all perched together at the end of the guest room bed. It was great. 

I didn't get a bath though. Not one! Dammit.

Bedknobs and what?sticks

Thursday night the following arrived at our house in quick succession:

1. A gloriously not-bent bed part. The correct one, even.

2. Weekend house guest, in town for a small and lovely Celebratory Pre-Birth Event held in my honor yesterday.

3. Saintly friend, inexplicably full of vim, vigor, and willingness to help Steve turn a very heavy assortment of bed parts downstairs into a solid, compete actual bed upstairs.

Saintly friend took off his shoes and rolled up his trousers in a dashing piratical style, then he and Steve set to work. I followed the traditional gendered division of labor, filling the time by staying well clear of all heavy lifting, feeding everyone, plying them with liquor, and advising house guest on her quilting project.

And now we have a BED, a real true bed, and though I am still not clear on what exactly makes it a better container for our mattress than the floor (beyond being pretty, which it is), I am pleased to report that whatever it is most assuredly DOES make it better. It is sunshine and lollipops and a happy lower back. Bed! Bed. Dear, wonderful bed.

+

My fecundity and I have been fêted. F, who was hosting, entertained us with a remarkable booklet from 1946. This document came along with your set of silver, to teach you how to entertain in a suitably elegant fashion, although the silver company's idea of what constitutes suitable elegance was perhaps not the same as yours or mine.

A highlight was what we swiftly renamed "The Racist Pie Game." The idea is that they present you with a list of people and it is your job to determine what kind of pie each person or group of people should be expected to like. You are aiming to dredge up the "correct" answers, as provided by the wise authors of the game. So, for instance, Eve of Eden fame likes apple pie, Mark Twain likes huckleberry pie, and the undertaker likes berry (bury) pie. And then...

Q. "The Yellow Race"

and

Q. "A mulatto"

WELL GOSH! That certainly is a lovely complement to your fine sterling, Mrs. Higgenbottom.

The answers, incidentally, are that the Orientals like lemon pie, and biracial people like chocolate. Yellow pie for yellow folks, chocolate pie for brown folks. Obviously.

If that game doesn't do it for you, you could always try this one, also well suited to elegant gatherings of well heeled adults: Everyone takes a sheet of paper and writes a list of attributes down the side, beginning with "Eyes, Nose, Hair" and continuing on through "Hat" and "Sex Appeal" with any number of other things I no longer remember along the way.

Then you rate each person on each quality on a scale of one to ten, including yourself, gather up the papers, and read the ratings aloud, making the group guess which person each set of ratings is meant to describe.

Everyone will have a merry time. "No offense can be taken at low ratings, as all is in the service of good fun."

Indeed. How could it possibly go wrong? At least, I suppose, you could steal the teaspoons as restitution. And your hat got a ten, anyway.

Just mice.

Thank you for the many fine suggestions in response to the last post. I am also gratified to learn that many of you agree that Facility has a real ring to it. Just now I realized that a fine French alternative would be Utile. Non? Ah, Marie-Utile, you are looking especially lovely today! Oh, Utile-Françoise, you flatterer.

I am currently stuck in my office, having promised someone who is both a late riser and on West Coast time that I would be available to receive a phone call. This was an error, but it is difficult to choose a better course of action when the other person's work day apparently begins right when one's own usually ends. Yes, we live in a glorious post-office world (not to be confused with a Post Office world) in which I can talk on the phone anywhere I like, ATT's dire coverage permitting, but in this case I would like to be able to take and refer to notes, sit in privacy and comfort, and so on, which selects strongly in favor of my dear old friend the office, with its desk and paper and pens and central heat and reliable reception. So here I am. Hélas.

Speaking of my office, a mouse found its way in over the holidays. It gnawed at the baseboards, chewed through the Ethernet cable, and then quietly died. Poor thing. It did perish in the most considerate possible way, from my point of view. First it made its way through to the other side of the wall so that the person in the next office over could be the one to find it, instead of me. Then it thoughtfully met its demise early enough in the winter break that the odiferous corpse period passed entirely unwitnessed by human nose. Thank you, little mouse.

My mother likes to tell a story about when I was a little girl that goes about like this: we were on a walk, and I wanted to pick some crummy little flower or other growing on the side of the road.

"Don't pick them, darling. They'll just die," she said. But I was determined, and they didn't belong to anyone, and parenthood, I've heard, involves choosing one's battles, so soon I had a few clutched in my little paw, and soon after that, of course, they were wilted and dead.

"Oh no!" I said.

"Well, I did warn you they were going to die."

Then -- or so she says, and it makes a good story -- I looked at her, stricken. "Just flowers, right? Not people?"

So: just mice, right, not people?

Sadly, no. People go around dying all the time, sometimes even before the new year has gotten started properly, and I don't like it. (I'm fine. But death is shitty and I don't approve. Happy new year!)

What happened there?

If you are suffering from Sunday malaise or something like it, let me recommend browsing through the archives of Improv Everywhere. Best known for staging mass depantsings on the NY subway, and originally given to staging events that were small in scale and a bit mean, they have over the last eight years inclined more and more towards the exuberantly bizarre and happy making. The Welcome Back stunt is a nice example, I think. I like to watch the video of the recipients being extremely puzzled but, it seems, genuinely enjoying the strangeness. It's cheering.

This small guinea pig story is also cheering.

The achy neck, scritchy throat, and strangely pressurized skull currently afflicting me are surely mere side effects of the flu shot I received on Saturday, not a sign that it came Too Late. Right? Right.

I think I had better have some tea.

While I do, let me tell you a story, or rather two proto-stories, about how my dad was very good at responding to the whims of a small child. Both took place in the car, as he was driving me from school or nursery school, probably to come hang out at his office.

He was, as I've mentioned, a secretary. Specifically, he worked in the music department of a university with quite a good music program. His office and the area just outside, which had a lovely enormous wood table to lounge on, were pleasantly full of students who found me a novelty. Taped to the door was a mystifying cartoon about something called an SAT. There were chairs with wheels on and a typewriter on which I was allowed produce pages of gibberish to my heart's content, while my father met with people and filled out forms on another typewriter, and arranged things on the phone. It was a nice place to visit.

Anyway, in the car. I was four or five. One day I announced that I would like to live in a mobile home. I had got some ideas from watching Sesame Street. It would be so much more fun, I said, to go to school in our house. 

"Oh but," said my dad, "look at that sign. It says that only vehicles of a certain weight can drive on this road. A mobile home weighs more than that. We couldn't drive you to school at all if we had one of those."

"Oh! Never mind then," said little me.

Another day I suggested that we should get a llama. (There was a bit on Sesame Street about a girl who took her pet llama to the llama dentist, apparently in a basement office somewhere in Manhattan.)

"You don't want a llama," he said. "They spit."

"Ooh, you're right, I don't! Never mind," said me.

What good parenting. No wonder I came out so well.

It was so long ago that he died. He never knew me as an adult or even as a full-fledged adolescent, and that of course goes both ways. I only ever knew him from a child's point of view. So generally, as I go through various grown-up rites of passage, I don't exactly wish he could have been there to see them, because it's so distant.

Of course I think about what it would have been like to know him that way, growing up, and how I would have liked that. It's just not "I wish he were here for this." But thinking about what life will be like with a baby in it is different. After all, I was a baby, and a little girl. I remember the latter, if not the former, and suddenly he's not distant at all.

I'm terrified of what it would be like if Steve died as young as he did. Please don't do that, Steve.

Dammit! This was not where I intended to wind up when I started writing. What was in that tea? I'd better go find a subway to take my trousers off in.

Dash it!

I ordered some things off the internet, as I do. This time it was a little pile of things from the King Arthur Flour catalog, to indulge the homemakerly baking impulses which naturally arise when it is cold and rainy for days and weeks on end.

I was especially looking forward to the arrival of a tiny bottle of Fiori di Sicilia extract, which was supposedly endowed with a highly intoxicating aroma. Another object of special anticipation was an enormous eight-cup measuring cup, allegedly handy for rising dough in, among other things. This excitement is how you know that I am an extremely fast-living, edgy person.

(In fact, I believe that it was on one of the many youthful occasions when my friend F. and I were very, very high that we had our seminal discussion on the topic of edge, and came to the firm conclusion that there was almost no way to be successfully edgy in real life. Stuffed to the gills with drugs? Not edgy, just high. Going on a sexy killing spree? Probably not actually sexy, in practice, for one thing. On the edge, maybe, but not edgy. Making weird cool experimental movies? Not edgy, due to requiring high degree of keeping-it-togetherness. Being Martin Sheen during the filming of Apocalypse Now? Looks edgy at a distance, but doubtless primarily boring up close. And so on.)

(Have I bleached the word "edgy" of all meaning for you yet? Spaghetti spaghetti spaghetti spaghetti spaghetti spaghetti spaghetti.)

Anyway, yesterday the box arrived and I made happy squeaking sounds. Presents!  

The eight-cup measure is all that I hoped it would be, and I am sure that the extra-special baking powder and yeast will leaven future treats beyond the dreams of avarice. There is also a GIANT SPATULA suitable for moving whole cakes around, as well as rounds of pie crust or loads of rolled cookies.

I saved unwrapping the extract for last, so I could sniff at it with my fullest crazy-person attention. But just as I did, alas, it rolled out of its packing paper and onto the wood floor, where it immediately broke and spilled every drop of its contents into one intoxicatingly scented puddle. Tragedy! All my plans to spend the weekend making Sicilian Flower baked goods dashed, rather literally, before my very eyes. The dining room does smell gorgeous, though, I admit.

Fortunately we are wealthy and can afford to order another bottle. My mother tells a poignant story from before I was old enough to notice or remember anything, about one of the very few times she can remember ever seeing my father cry. She was working as a picture framer and he was cobbling together the income from being a low-ranking university secretary and playing odd weekend guitar gigs at a dubious local "bar and grille." They also had a small child, me, and money was not in copious supply. The budget allowed them each one small treat per week, and his was a jar of generic brand dry-roasted peanuts. (This was in the time when there was a generic aisle at the supermarket, and the food sold there really did look like something out of Repo Man.)

One day, a grocery bag broke as he was carrying it up the front steps. The jar shattered. The peanuts were hopelessly mixed up with tiny shards of glass, beyond recovery. There was no money to buy another jar. There was nothing to do but sit on the step and weep. Poor Daddy.

It's cold and rainy again today, and I can afford to go to the store and buy extra ingredients if I need them. What would you bake if you were me?

Tea fancying

My mother and her cousin Louise recently came for a visit. They were ideal guests--never bored, good company, enthusiastic about my cooking, and perfectly happy to sit around drinking endless cups of tea and call it being entertained.

Louise, like many of my relations, is English. She lives in Brighton, well, in fact Hove Actually, and we visited her ourselves not long ago when we were done visiting London.

Like the rest of us, she's not especially patriotic, being endowed with your typical left-leaning intellectual skepticism about such things, but that doesn't mean her soul is utterly dead to national pride on matters of real importance. So, appropriately, she mocked me for buying my tea from France.

"French tea! The French don't know anything about tea! Coffee yes, tea no."

"I don't think that much of French coffee, actually," Steve offered.

"It's good tea though, isn't it?" I asked.

"But France! Tea should come from China, or India."

"I don't think anyone is suggesting that they grew the tea in France."

Anyway, it is awfully good, especially if like me you like all those Russian-influenced French teas with flowers and dried fruits mixed in. I order pounds at a time, to lessen the oof of international shipping. Then we drink it all in less time than you would think and I order some more. As a result, I am an official Théophile, which is to say a frequent buyer. In fact, the euro-spending threshold for Théophilia looks, I regret to report, comically low from here.

Well! you say. What a vice! Between that and the bricks of heroin, how do you manage to hold down a job?

To that I say, well, my mother has a special iPhone application for birdwatching.

Feeling clever.

Lazy Saturday. Rather than grade the stack of exams currently waiting for me, I am letting them sit in my office so that some of their germy coating can die off before I handle them too extensively. This may be paranoid and deranged, but (a) why look an excuse for procrastination in the mouth, and (b) there were a couple of all too vivid occasions on which a student was schnurfling ostentatiously with one hand (and nose) and handing me the exam with the other. SCHRURGHFRFRFRF. Mm, swiney delicious.

Cecily sent me this charming piece of brain imaging research, showing that certain areas in the brains of deceased Atlantic salmon show activation during a cross-species perspective-taking task.

Hello, I'm a cogitating dead fish!

I know the feeling.

(The point of the poster, of course--which is written in a delightfully dry tone, and you should click through to enjoy it--is that fMRI research often neglects to do all the cross-comparisons necessary to correct for false positives. If you're actually interested, you can read more about it here. But my point is that we're all a little bit like dead salmon, really, when you think about it, innit?)

My mother, my self.

When I was a petulant adolescent I loathed, as one does, to be told that I was anything like my mother. However, I can now admit that there are many ways in which we are virtually identical. Observe:

Me: I also bought some Little Scarlet when I was in England (have you heard of it?) despite the fact that a jar of jam is like the stupidest thing possible to buy when overseas. It made it home fine, though. I also got a nice enameled pan with a spout: http://www.labourandwait.co.uk/moreInfo.asp?prodID=161 Like it?

She: I LOVE your pan. What is Little Scarlet? Inquiring minds may have to google it.

Me: Check it: http://www.littlescarlet.com/

She: OMG. Little Scarlet is perfectly calibrated to send my personal greedometer spinning round and round. Do tell me when you try it, and how it was.

I too bring jams and lemon curds and such home from holidays. It may not be practical, but it is still a better choice than the time I brought the stinky Limeswold cheese home in my hand luggage.

In light of aforementioned family resemblance on display here, is the fact that I find this charming actually a reflection of sheerest narcissism? I fear that the answer is yes, or at least not entirely no.