Maternally Challenged

Offending the Water Gods

Clearly, we have offended the Water Gods. Over the years, the following things have happened in our house:

1. My husband turned on the kitchen sink faucet one night and a geyser of brown water approximately the size and velocity of Old Faithful shot up from the spray attachment.

2. A pinhole leak developed in the water line that went to the ice maker, gradually turning the brand new laminate floor we had just installed in the kitchen into cardboard mush, despite my repeated inquiries, "Did somebody drop an ice cube here?"

3. The washing machine began belching water every time I turned it on, and continued doing so until I pulled up a chair, sat down and watched it through an entire washing cycle (yes, this is how I spend my time) and deduced that, in fact, it was the WATER HEATER which was leaking.

4. A mysterious puddle appeared in the hallway outside the downstairs bathroom and stayed there for the better part of a year despite the best efforts of an entire brain trust (to use the term loosely) of plumbing companies to figure out where it was coming from. The puddle lasted so long the carpet grew mushrooms--yes, mushrooms--and had to be replaced. After tearing up three walls, repairing the roof and jackhammering through the foundation of the house, we discovered it was a) a badly aimed shower head, combined with b) a leaking toilet seal. Total cost: about $2,500. Note to file: State Farm covers the cost of jackhammering the foundation when there is a leak to be fixed down there. If it turns out you jackhammered and do not find a leak, State Farm will tell you very nicely to kiss their ass. Especially if this happens right after Hurricane Katrina.

So you may understand why, when I heard a dripping sound in the laundry room last night, my right eye started that twitchy thing again. I looked around and discovered that the pipe leading from the water heater into the bowels of the house was leaking. Copiously. We're talking enough to fill a large bucket in the space of an hour. I informed my husband that we had a Plumbing Emergency. His reaction was, "Can it wait until morning?"

"No," I said decisively. "We need a plumber NOW. In the morning it will be a lake in there."

The first plumber I called was one we had used last year during the Mystery Puddle Saga, and they refused to come. Well, they didn't exactly refuse, but they sure dragged their feet about finding somebody who was "available" and they sounded suspiciously la-di-da when I finally called them and said I'd gotten somebody else. I suspect they still hold a grudge from when I called one of their guys a "moron" last year. In a fax. Which was read by the entire office. (People can be so sensitive.)

In the end, the problem last night proved to be, yup, the water line to the ice maker again. The little plastic tube had been resting against a hot water line into the water heater and so it wasn't the big iron pipe that was leaking, as I had so decisively assumed, but the little plastic tuby thing, which had melted through and which we could have fixed easily with four inches of duct tape. Have I mentioned that my husband works for NASA, the same guys who brought Apollo 13 back from the moon by using duct tape? Not that I blame my husband; I was the one who had jumped to conclusions. It just seems ironic, is all.

Anyway, the total bill for last night came to $350. That puts this fiasco in a league above the last dumb-ass thing I did, which was to call a plumber to unclog the garbage disposal unit. He put a beefy pinky down there, retrieved a red plastic spoon from my daughter's tea set, and said, "That'll be $100."

If anybody knows how to soothe the wrath of a pissed off Water God, and where one goes to do it, I'll be in the upstairs bathroom. I just heard the toilet up there running.

The Horror

For me these days, a bad day is finding out about an $800 transmission bill on the car we bought last year. The poor civilians living in southern Lebanon and northern Israel would probably cut off a limb right now to have a day that good. Take a look at these home movies from hell to get a sense of what it's like to live in a place where, at any moment, something loaded with shrapnel and explosives could fall from the sky and destroy all your nice deck furniture, plus the deck, plus maybe somebody you love. Not to mention the gas station you visit once a week.

The ordinariness is what's so chilling. It reminds me of the most frightening quote I've ever heard, from Leon Trotsky: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

Pray, people.

Lardbutts

This just in, from the Washington Post: "Pungo, Va., may have to come up with some other historical tidbit as its claim to fame. The Witch of Pungo -- who supposedly accursed Tidewater farms in the 17th and 18th centuries -- has been cleared of all charges, namely that she was ever a witch. On Monday, 300 years after Grace Sherwood was convicted at a trial that saw her thrown into the Lynnhaven River with her thumbs tied to her feet, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine pardoned her. The rules of the trial were simple: If you floated, you were guilty of being a witch; if you sank, you were cleared. And dead."

Okay, people, I want you to take this little test next time you're in the community pool. Take a deep breath, grab your ankles, and let the water do with you what it will. Unless you are a) anorexic; b) a child, c) a trained athlete with a disgusting muscle-to-fat ratio or d) male, you're gonna float. Guess which part floats first? Your ass.

Clearly, the only women who were convicted of being witches in Puritan times were women who were, shall we say, broad in the beam? Had a lot of junk in the trunk. Needed a permit for their trailer...Choose your euphemism. In my own family, we refer to this condition as the Alta Mae Disease, named after a long-dead relative whose picture, taken in the 1920s, features a drop-waisted flapper girl outfit which accentuates her hips, and which (oh, the horror) has a silk rosette the size of a turkey platter (sob!) attached on one side. The overall visual effect is of a woman whose butt looks to be approximately the size of Detroit, including the outlying suburbs. I inherited the Alta Mae gene, as did my cousin Harriet, who once lost a watch in the bottom of her backyard pool and had to wait until fall, when the pool maintenance men came to drain it, to get it back, because she could not make it down to the bottom of the deep end to fish it out no matter how hard she paddled.

Everyone knows those people with the weird gleam in their eyes who wanted to kill witches had a screw or two loose. Now we know what it was: rank bigotry that penalized people with Humongous Asses. (Speaking of this reminds me one of Bart Simpson's favorite pranks--calling up Moe's and asking to speak to a Hugh Jass. Nope, Moe says, nobody here by that name, to which Bart replies, "Maybe he's in the bathroom" so Moe obligingly puts down the phone and yells out, "Is there a Hugh Jass in the men's room?" Okay, it's corny, but it cracks me up every time.)

Now, 300 years later, poor Grace Sherwood gets exonerated of the charge of witchcraft. Even if she were alive, this wouldn't do her any good, because having a fat ass these days is worse, in some ways, than being accused of being a witch. You could keep a low profile in those days and maybe avoid trouble, but there's no way to hide a big butt. Especially when it's the only part of you sticking up out of the water.

Proustian Questions

Recently, Her Bad Mother , a.k.a. Catherine Connors, asked some Proustian questions about blogging, which I will now attempt to answer:

1) What is the quality you most admire in a blogger?

They gotta make me laugh. Or maybe cry. But mostly I am looking for a laugh.

2) What is your most marked blogging characteristic (or, how would you describe your blog)?

Hard to say. I've been keeping a journal in some form or other since I was 14. So this seems very familiar. I just have to remember to keep my kids' real names out of it, is all.

3) What is your greatest virtue as a blogger (what do you most like about your blog)?

I try to say things other people are thinking but don't dare to say. Or, alternatively, make people laugh.

4) What do you regard as the principle defect of your blog?

Too much about me, not enough about current events. Which are truly frightening, so much so that I'd rather cover my ears and yell "Nyah Nyah Nyah!"--so, as you can see, I have trouble sticking to my goal.

5) What character of fiction do you most wish had a blog?

I would change this question to "what character in history," and my answer would be Elizabeth I. I used to be her, you know. Others have made this claim, but they are all con artists. I am the genuwine article.

6) What [other] historical or real life person do you most wish had a blog?

George W. Bush, because I truly do not understand how that man thinks. I mean, something must be goin' on in there, but I'm damned if I can figure out what it is. My best guess is that it is a looping re-run of "Animal House," which probably reminds him of his own days at Yale. He was not the John Belushi character, but wishes he was.

7) What is your present state of blog (present state of mind as a blogger)?

Bemusement. What will we all do with ourselves when Peak Oil hits and the generators go down and the batteries run out?

8) What is your blog motto?

"It's a weird fuckin' world, ain't it?" No, I'm sorry--my real motto is "They say children will drive you crazy. But what if you're already there?" It's either that or "Sisterhood is powerful. Motherhood is nuclear." I forget.
 

9. What do I regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Mental illness, which I know a little too much about. But then, I've never had to go grocery shopping in Beirut while the bombs are falling, so I could be wrong about this.

10. What is your idea of earthly happiness?

Well, at the moment, since I'm feeling kinda puny and have been up coughing all night, it would be lying in the warm sun in a hammock with a syringe of Darvon at hand. But I am trying to cultivate healthier habits. Actually, marveling at my children's beauty is a pretty good pastime.

Dog Eat Dog

Parenting is an extreme sport, and the only parents who do not know this are a) blessed with perfect health and/or b) blessed with perfect marriages, and if there is anybody out there who meets this description, please contact me. Certainly single parents know this. Married parents know it when one of them gets sick, which is what happened to us this weekend.

The sick one is me, and the symptoms arrived right on cue on Saturday morning: headache, incredibly sore throat, cough, stuffy nose, watery eyes, pain in joints that made me feel like the garbage truck had run over me, backed up, and run over me again. Heroically, I took Suzanne to a birthday party at Chuck E Cheese.

Here, I shall digress: I have been in a psych ward, and I have been to Chuck E Cheese, and I can tell you now that the only differences between the two is that at Chuck E Cheese they do not participate with Blue Cross and, due to fire regulations, they do not lock the doors. Otherwise, the exact same barely controlled bedlam: persons running around screaming, foul food, indifferent caregivers/waitpersons, six-foot-tall rodents.... Actually, Chuck E Cheese could improve on its business model by just hiring people who would point a gun at your kneecaps and say, "Fork it over," because this buying tokens to play games to earn tickets to "buy" prizes makes a Mafia loanshark look like your kindly old Aunt Eda. While Suzanne was scarfing down her pizza and cake and communing with the Giant Rodent, I bought $5 worth of tokens and attempted to distract myself from the ballpeen hammer whanging against my head by playing some skeeball. I am pretty good at skeeball and I won over 100 tickets. This, it turns out, was enough to knock all of 80 cents off the price of the Barbie make-up kit which Suzanne demanded before we left. Let's see: I pay them $5, they give me 80 cents....that's a return on investment of 84 percent. Come to think of it, their business model works fine. Why waste money on guns?

But anyway, so I was sick, and when Suzanne and I got back home I went straight to bed. Woke up at 7 feeling worse. Called the local doc-in-a-box and, in a perverse version of Famiy Night Out, we all loaded up in the minivan so David could take the kids to the mall across the street while mom was left at the doc-in-a-box to find out which germ would be memorialized on her tombstone. Diagnosis: viral upper respiratory infection of nameless origin. "You'll probably feel bad for about a week," says the doctor cheerfully, who then added the obligatory "We've been seeing a lot of this." I relay this news to David, who (I can tell) is royally pissed at me for getting sick on a weekend. This sounds churlish, but if the shoe were on the other foot, I'd be unhappy too. Two kids plus one rainy weekend plus one sick parent=insanity, with household squalor thrown in as a bonus. This is where the extreme sport metaphor comes in, because if you were part of a team climbing Mount Everest with two kids in tow, and one of you broke his/her leg, you wouldn't be solicitous and caring. You'd be, "I don't CARE if your leg bends in four places now, let's get going or we will DIE."

It is now Sunday night and the only way we have made it through the weekend without homicide or divorce is that I finally dragged my butt out of bed and called up my friend Ann and begged her to take Suzanne off our hands. A  nine-year-old can amuse herself, but a five-year-old...well, let's just say Suzanne has an Inquiring Mind and she Wants to Know. Everything. Right Now. And she asks questions that are not only unanswerable but inscrutable, such as "Mommy, what happens in the spring?" Once I kept count in the car: in ten minutes, she asked me 20 questions. It's enough to drive a healthy person off a cliff, and I am not well. Which is where I started this, so I will quit now. And so to bed.

The Devil Wears Prada

So we went, and I didn't expect to be blown away, but I was. Not by Meryl Streep so much (though she was manificent), or Stanley Tucci (who was wonderful, as always) or by Anne Hathaway (who I am more and more impressed by, and who didn't get the props she deserved for Brokeback Mountain)--but by the story itself.

I know somebody who used to work for Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue who is the model, everybody strenuously denies, for the Amanda Priestley character in the film. Yes, my former colleague says, Anna Wintour was hard to work for, and demanding, and occasionally imperious; yes, she inspired fear. It was true that people had been known to break into a run to fetch Anna's coffee...even people who didn't actually work for her. And yet, my former colleague said, Anna was, on the whole, a good boss. 

It's funny, that a movie that was supposed to skewer this Bitch on Wheels ended up making her look pretty good, in my opinion. But then, I have a weakness for people who have high standards--even if they have a lot of foibles thrown in there, too--and so I suspect that in real life, I would have tried pretty hard to win Anna Wintour/Amanda Priestley's good opinion of me, too.

Is this groveling? No. There are limits--the character of Andi, played in the movie by Anne Hathaway--found her limits; there was a line she would not cross to be successful at all costs. That's an important thing to keep in mind. But within those fairly broad confines, there is lots of room to learn from people who care about what they are doing, who want it done right, who never stop looking for ways to improve it, and who see a larger significance in what they do.

I saw this movie as somebody who doesn't "get" fashion--as anybody who has ever known me will attest--and so I shared Andi's initial disdain about a job at a "mere" fashion magazine, where any woman bigger than a size 2 is considered fat and where appearance is everything. What blew me away, though, was the way Amanda disemboweled that intellectual pretense, in a scene where Andi snickers at some confab over color choices. I don't remember the dialogue, of course, but it went something like this. "Oh, I see," Amanda says, glancing at Andi. "You think this isn't important. You think that because this is just about...clothes...that only frivolous people are concerned with it, and so we are all beneath you. But that...thing...you're wearing, that blue thing--yes, that's cerulean blue. That color was big five or six years ago. Karl Lagerfeld used it, I think, and so it trickled down into the pret-a-porter, and then into the better department stores, and from there into the mass market and then, no doubt, into the clearance bin at Casual Corner where you found it. And you think that you chose that color. But, you see, you didn't choose it at all. It was chosen for you, by the five or six people standing right here in this room." In other words, this is a billion-dollar industry, toots, which employs millions of people around the world, and if you don't think it's important, then you are too snobby to see past your own little nose. When she's done, Andi is about six inches tall, and looking for a rug to crawl under.

And so, soon after, Andi goes to Stanley Tucci (the art director of the magazine) to complain about how little appreciated she is, how Amanda never notices when she does things right, just excoriates her when she screws up. "And that is my problem how?" he asks coolly. "Look at you. You have a job that a million girls would give anything for, and you deigned to take it--you lowered your standards to take it--because it pays the rent. And then you complain because Amanda doesn't think you take your work very seriously." It's a turning point: Andi starts getting serious about learning the fashion industry, and her career takes a dramatic upward turn. But in the end, she is not ready to become another Amanda; she won't sacrifice just anything to get ahead. She does not believe, as Amanda so assuredly states, "Darling, everybody wants to be us." Andi learns what's there to be learned, and what will be of value to her--chiefly, that she is capable of so much more than she ever dreamed of--and then she walks away. And her career is launched, in a whole new direction.

We should all be so lucky to have bosses who expect that much of us, and to encounter them early in our careers. The world is full of asshole bosses these days, who don't know what they're doing but don't let that get in the way of acting as if they do; the world is also full of employees ready to lay down the law to their employer about what they will and will not do--sometimes for good reason. But sometimes, let's be honest, it's just laziness, the "clocking out" syndrome. The thing to look for is the boss who expects the world of you because he or she has standards, and because they expect you to live up to them. I've had bosses like that--one or two--and, believe me, I busted my ass to deliver. Some were curmudgeonly; some lacked basic people skills; some were eccentric as hell; some were saints in the workplace but hell for their families to put up with--but they all made me a better writer and a better journalist than I would have been under other circumstances. I am fortunate to have known them.

So for every young person starting out today: I hope you, too, encounter a Devil who wears Prada, or Armani, or the functional equivalent. Someday you'll thank your lucky stars.

Old Fashioned Ways

I put up 12 pints of black raspberry syrup today.

This announcement would have made my grandma swallow her chewing tobacco. "What'd you do the rest of the day?" she would have said. "File your toenails? Clean out your bellybutton? Eat bonbons?" I am not that old (really, I'm not) but in my memory bank there are pictures of my grandparents doing all kinds of things we think of today as strictly 19th century: slaughtering a hog, making their own sausage, plowing, planting, hoeing, harvesting and canning their own food, slopping the hogs. Summertime canning was a big deal, and it was still a big deal when I was growing up in a house next door to my grandparents' place, near Red Oak, Georgia. We always made plum jam, from the plums we picked off the tree in the side yard. I remember my mother in the kitchen, sweaty and disheveled, measuring out the sugar and skimming the foam off the top of the simmering fruit (everybody knows if you let that foam in, your jelly will be cloudy). Canning was then what motherhood is today: a competitive sport. Whoever made the clearest jelly won the prize, and you had to make it look like you did all that work in between plucking your eyebrows and catching up on the soaps ("Oh, that! Well, I wasn't busy Saturday, and...."). Using store-bought pectin was considered cheating. Pioneer women didn't have store-bought pectin, did they? All righty, then!

This is all stuff we're going to have to know soon, if you believe the Peak Oil people. These are the folks who say that the earth's supply of oil has already peaked and that soon--very, very soon; in the next five years or so--there will be a worldwide economic collapse, energy will be available only for the extremely wealthy and we will all go back to having to live on the land. Nobody can tell the future, of course, but predictions of the imminent collapse of civilization are nothing new. Still, oil is a finite resource, we depend on it for everything (this computer you're reading this on: made from oil, transported to your house by oil; the electricity that runs it probably derived from oil), and sooner or later, yes indeed, it will run out. (If you want to read up on this, I recommend the August issue of Harper's Magazine, and I would post the URL to the article itself except that it's not up on their website yet.) So maybe it is to my advantage that I had this agrarian childhood: when we are all tilling every square inch of arable land, I will be just a tad ahead of everybody else's learning curve.

But just a tad. As I worked today, little bits and pieces came back to me. My husband and the girls had gone off and picked the berries, so I found a recipe (online, natch) and washed the fruit, put it in big pots, measured the sugar, stuck in a little lemon peel, and started boiling. I went to the local hardware store, which hasn't been Home Depot-ed out of existence yet, and bought jars and lids. I was back home, ready to start squeezing the juice, when it dawned on me: no cheesecloth. At that moment, a fragment of memory surfaced: my mother's hands, carefully squeezing juice out of a steaming strip of old bedsheet. That I had. I tore it up into pieces, dumped the pulpy, steaming fruit in there, and started squeezing. I remembered how, as a child, I marveled at how my mother could stand to put her hands in something that had been boiling only a short while earlier; now here I was, doing the same thing. I could almost sense her nearby. "Don't squeeze too hard," her ghost was saying to me. "You don't want to get any pulp in there." Then I sterilized the jars and lids, and poured the syrup in.

When I was done, there they were: 12 perfect little jars of home-made black raspberry syrup. I have not felt such a sense of accomplishment since--well, I don't know when--and when I was done I sat down and the grief I felt for my mother was like an ache in my bones.

Kid Demons

My nine-year-old has a demon. It's called anxiety. Anxiety disorders which strike children prior to puberty mean that these children are at especially high risk of developing a mood disorder later on, according to research done by Myrna Weissman at Columbia University. And it happens, all too often, to children of mothers who deal with depression--especially if they weren't getting adequate treatment (as I wasn't, during my pregnancy with Rebecca and for the first year after her birth). Or maybe it was just in the cards; maybe it would have happened no matter what. All I know is that my youngest was born after I knew more about how to take care of myself, and her equilibrium is pretty steady. But my nine-year-old was diagnosed at age seven as having an anxiety disorder. When she is not freaking out over something, anxiety can manifest as rage.

Yesterday she got upset because summer camp was going to feature some dance lessons that day. Rebecca is very self-conscious about performing in public; she didn't want to go. She told us that. She told us that again. She told us perhaps 25 times during breakfast: "I don't wanna go to camp today." At what point does a parent say, "Okay, honey, you don't have to," and at what point does a parent say, "You have to at least try"? We opted for the latter; letting a child know that throwing a hissy fit will get her out of something she wants to do...well, we just weren't going there. She began to cry. She began to moan in a theatrical way. My five-year-old tried to comfort her and was rudely rebuffed. I took my five-year-old into the living room and laced her shoes while telling her she had done a sweet thing, that this wasn't her fault, and that her big sister wasn't feeling well. She nodded; she's seen these things before--all her life, in fact. Meanwhile, back in the family room, Rebecca was getting louder and more insistent: she wasn't going, that was final, nobody could make her. And what's more, she hated us. She hated us all.

At these times, one of two things happens to me. Either I get very Zen and just ride out the storm, or I get hauled into the maelstrom myself. This time I managed to maintain my Zen. Rebecca was hysterical now, red faced and crying. "You are having an anxiety attack," I said. "I DON'T CARE!" she screamed at me. Her green eyes were like demon eyes. I did something I rarely do: I got one of my own anti-anxiety pills, cut it in half, and offered it to her. "It will help," I said. "Not for every time, but this time I think it will help."

"I DON'T WANT YOUR STUPID PILLS!" she screamed. "Okay," I said. The last thing I would do was force it down her throat. I knew at that moment that millions of parents would be horrified I had even offered it to her.

It got uglier. More screaming, more vitriol. She had worked herself up into complete hysteria over the prospect of having to learn dance steps in front of people she did not know. Finally my husband picked her up and carried her out the door. She was screaming, grabbing at the door frame, fighting every inch of the way. I can't imagine what the neighbors saw. He put her down just outside and said, "Now will you walk?" Her answer was to race upstairs to her room and lock the door. I went upstairs with the cat and talked my way in. She was sobbing on the side of her bed. We sat and stroked the cat for a while, which helped. Eventually--it took about 15 minutes--I got her downstairs. We got her hairbrush, a cold damp cloth (her eyes were red and swollen), her shoes and socks, her lunch. When my husband pulled out from the driveway, all I could see was her face in the back seat, tears running down her cheeks, her mouth making the words, "I HATE YOU."

I went inside and sat down. My hands were shaking. I called her therapist and told her what had happened. "You did the right thing," her doctor said. I even told her about the pill. "I'm not an M.D.," she said, "but I think a psychiatrist would have told you to do that."

"I know a lot of parents who would report me for that," I said miserably.

"They don't know what it's like," she said.

"I feel like crying," I said.

"Then do," she said.

So I did. I put my head on my desk and sobbed.

That afternoon at 3 I picked her up. I could expect one of two things: either a sullen kid, full of rage, or Miss Congeniality--the persona she adopts when she realizes she has made a spectacle of herself and wants to forget it as soon as possible. This time, it was Miss Congeniality. She bounced to the car, all smiles.

"How was camp?" I asked.

"Great!"

I'm still getting over this scene; so is my husband. The five-year-old has weathered the storm, more or less. This is our life. It could happen again next week, next month. You never know. Neither does she. My big girl, my sweet girl, has these demons to fight, and because of that, we all do.

One Minivan 4 Sale

Somewhere, buried deep in the Federal Civil Code, there is a statute that says, "Upon the arrival of any child subsequent to the first, all U.S. citizen family units must purchase a minivan."

At least, that must have been what we were thinking, because when our five-year-old was born we bought a minivan. At the time, it seemed like a must-have: we were four now, a real family, and the old Saturn station wagon just wouldn't do. We needed Space. We needed Cup Holders. We needed a fold-down back seat and doors that would open and close with the touch of a button. All this, and more, we got.

Now that 2001 Dodge Caravan seems like a dented two-ton tin can on wheels. It takes $50 to fill the sucker up, and every time I pull out on the road I look in my rear view mirror at at least three empty seats and think about the hole in the ozone layer they are going to name just for us. All that space hasn't done us any good; my two girls each have their own Captain's Chair (that's what the brochure called it) and still they fight like two cats in a sack.

Did I mention that it weighs two tons? This fact took a long time to percolate into my forebrain and before it did, I had managed to sideswipe one car, back into another car, take out a pole at the post office, run down a gas pump and back into somebody's mail box. State Farm dropped me. The mail box dent is still there because at this point I can't afford to file any more claims and the $800 it would take the fix the door just ain't worth it. It's proved useful, in a way: there are so many silver minivans in the world that on some days the dent is the only way I can find my car in the goddamn parking lot. The dent identifies it--that, and the "It's Up to the  Women--Vote Kerry/Edwards!" bumper sticker. (Yeah, that really worked, didn't it?)

People with three kids probably need a minivan. People with two kids, like me, should be locked up for even thinking about buying a vehicle the size of a Dempsey Dumpster just to go to the Safeway.

So here it is, folks--an authenthic Suburban Mommobile. Make me an offer. 64,000 miles,  new tires, has had regular oil changes and comes with an interesting smell in the back seat I have never been able to identify. I'll throw in a ten percent discount if you take the two hellions in the middle section, too.

The Fourth of July

Nothing like spending the holiday in a lukewarm vat of chlorinated pee-pee.

We went to the pool yesterday and ate free hotdogs at the annual Fourth of July picnic. The place was mobbed. It reminded me of that quote--from some Oscar Wilde play, I think--about what it was like being in combat: "My dear, the noise! And the people!" The pool was wall-to-wall kids. A few moms and dads were out there too, but as for adult conversation--it would have been easier to talk at Omaha Beach on D-Day. And even if you could make yourself heard, it seems to deeply offend a kid's sensibilities that you might find another adult more interesting than them. At one point, while my friend Anne and I were screaming at each other in a sociable way, I happened to notice that my nine-year-old had my left leg in a vise-like grip, attempting to haul me away.