@ Home in the World

Diner

 
There's nothing like the smell of bacon and coffee when you come inside from the cold just after sun up. Though it's early, it seems as if half the town is already there, tucking into their eggs and toast.

The waitress, and old Al behind the counter, know you by name and probably know what you'll have, though they may try to sell you on a different kind of omelet or a new muffin they're trying out this week.

You sit at the worn, Formica, counter, give your order and spread the newspaper out before you, grabbing a headline or two as the coffee is poured. When you leave, you'll drop the paper in the basket by the door, left there so the next guy will get the news for free. It's tradition.

You nod and exchange a few words with the others at the counter. You know them, they are loggers, or lobstermen, or they have shop in town. They're headed to work after breakfast, so the meal must be filling.

If it's later in the morning, the patrons coming in will be couples, and groups of older women catching up. You'll know most people in the room by sight and some may stop to greet you as they head over to their tables.

The food is coming, placed in front of you with a satisfying plunk, and a gentle warning about the temperature of the plate. The waitress tours the room, coffee pot in hand, looking for a mug in need.

The din is louder now. Silverware clatters as it's cleared and set. Seats emptied, table wiped, then filled again. The papers in the basket have been broken up into sections, and one article or another has started conversation; taxes, or the town manager, or someone's grandchild in the school play. There may be two or four at your table, but you are really a party of forty-five. It's hard not to overhear, turn around, check in, ask a question, share a joke or condolence.

In spite of the warmth of the room, women hunch, fingers curled around the heavy, white, stoneware, sweater sleeves pulled up to their thumbs, clutching their mugs as a reliable source of heat. The coffee keeps flowing.

Breakfast never takes long. Patrons come and go; in and out like a life force pumping through the heart of town. Check paid, tip left, you're out the door and ready to start the day.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I wrote this because the image of the diner mug popped into my head and wouldn't leave. The scene is an amalgam of two diners in New Hampshire (one has people arriving via snowmobile in the winter), and a breakfast place here in town. Going out to breakfast is one of my favorite simple pleasures. For breakfast, I find that small town diners are better than regular restaurants or pancake chains. They may be the happiest places on Earth.

Three Ring Supermarket

Twenty years ago, a friend who had moved to rural Colorado from a busy neighborhood just outside of Boston, wrote and told me that the big excitement in her area was the opening of a new Wal-mart. The retailing giant was not quite as giant as it is today and had not yet reached the Northeast. I had no idea what it was and when I found out that it was a retail chain much like Caldor, Bradlees, or Lechmere (remember those?), I didn't quite understand what the big deal was.

Last week, a new supermarket opened in the town next to ours. I know this doesn't sound like a big deal, especially since we already had two other supermarkets in the area, but it is. See, we're not easy to get to where we live and the two existing supermarkets were taking advantage of this fact by charging astronomical prices for their offerings; close to $6 for a gallon of non-organic milk for example. Infuriating!

So many people in this area found themselves making a weekly pilgrimage to a place we'll call Market 3 located 20 miles away from where we all live. It wasn't unusual to bump into a neighbor and congratulate one another for refusing to pay the extortion fees charged by Markets 1 & 2 closer to home.

About a year ago, maybe more, we began hearing rumors, eventually confirmed that Market 3 was finally, finally(!), coming to our area. They had been trying to get here for decades, but there was always some zoning dispute or NIMBY-eruption blocking their entry. At last, a mall developer was clearing (literally) the way and Market 3 would finally force Markets 1 & 2 to behave as if they weren't the only weren't the only game in town. I can take or leave a new mall, but I wanted to see a Market 3!

This fight wasn't easy either. People objected to the destruction of a wooded area that was slated for development anyway. There were wetlands issues, of course. There was the traffic light, omigod, the traffic light. There were literally people driving around town with bumperstickers reading "Fight the Light," and guess what, they won! There was the closing of a school adjacent to the property, the reasons for that were more complex, but no one's admitting it had anything to do with the mall development. Finally, there was some property tax break that the developer got that people were incensed about. The bumpersticker for that? "No FREE LUNCH!" That battle, they lost.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not typically pro-development, but I've seen decades worth of good project proposals fought against for any number of trumped-up reasons because certain people in this area do not want to move forward in any way, large or small. The ones that really infuriate me involve existing and often abandoned buildings left to rust and rot because people don't want a hotel or condos near them. They'd prefer to look at the decaying buildings day after day. Unbelievable!

Now, I wasn't really planning to go to the opening day, but I had some time, and a list, so I did. Okay, it wasn't like the opening of a new IKEA (I went to that in New Haven years ago, big mistake!), but it was crowded and busy. There were jacketed employees everywhere greeting people and straightening items on shelves, making everything look like it has just been placed there.

There were people directing traffic at the deli, people restocking shelves, managers standing around joking and  laughing (which is so odd because usually they are telling their employees not to do that). There was a manager on the PA system calling out bargains like some carnival barker - "Ritz Crackers, one dollar in Aisle 5!"

But the really weird thing, the thing that you never see in supermarkets, was that everyone, including the customers, was smiling. Seriously, the atmosphere was such that you expected people to lean forward on their cart handles and click their heels in the air, or maybe perform synchronous carriage twirls in the aisles.  Shoppers were giddy.

Was it the prices? Was it the novelty? Or was it the fact that after many, long years, the mighty forces against progress that I christened the "anti-brigade" were vanquished just this once.

End of Summer

 Fireweed is Alaska's natural calendar. You can tell by where the flowers are blooming on the stalk how close to the end of the summer you are. The higher the bloom, the closer the cooler weather.

Here in New England, surprisingly cooler air in the early morning and early evening are the harbingers of autumn. You may be unnerved to find yourself wanting a sweater in August, but it is also good snuggling weather, helping to squeeze the last little bit of romance out of the waning summer.

The boys have pitched a tent in the back yard. We are allowing them to try sleeping outdoors as an end-of-summer treat. The first night Pumpkin kept running in and out of the house, because he "forgot" things - books, Curious George, several Matchbox cars, and so on. I had a good laugh about this until a Facebook friend mentioned that her children took a LAPTOP out to their backyard camp site. Apparently, not even camping is what it used to be.

I still can't get used to the idea of school starting before Labor Day. Year after year, I hear about teachers and students completely spent by early June, and how an early start affords them the opportunity to get a break when they need it most. Starting early allows them to get that many more teaching days in before the standardized tests in the spring, and when you must get so much covered before the kids sit for the exam, I suppose even a couple of extra days can help.

So now that it is September, school has begun, supplies have been purchased and pre-paying for the school lunches has been figured out, I am waiting for my own fresh start. Unexpectedly unemployed this summer, I must now get serious about finding work of some kind. Not that I wasn't serious before, but it is difficult to get a job in the summer. Not many people are actually interviewing candidates for advertised positions, even when the economy is not in the straits it is now. I've been furiously sending out resumes and inquiries, and we'll see if my theory is correct that contacts should pick up this week, after the holiday, and next.

The patio became my new workspace about a week ago when I remembered I could manage the brightness on my new laptop. Robbed of a summery June, I now want to inhale the remaining beautiful weather. Summers seemed to go on forever when I was a kid. Now they fly by and I want to turn around and grab that time back instead of moving confidently forward into the season of new beginnings. Though there is certainly a part of me that relishes the autumn sweaters and the comfort food, it's hard to look at all this leafy green that remains and realize that this is not the normal state of things. This is a treat.

Must. Write. Something.

August. Summer is turning the bend.

We have started harvesting the zucchini and summer squashes from the garden, and we are eagerly waiting to see if the corn will amount to anything this year. The tomatoes have exploded, but they are still green, so it is hard to know how many will ripen before summer's end. If all goes well, we could have sauce to freeze and use well into the winter.

In spite of the rain - nearly constant through June -  this hasn't been a bad summer. Sure, there have been rough moments as that nagging fear about what I really am going to do next has crept in to my damp, musty, brain. But for the most part, I've put this unexpected time off to good use. My house feels a little more under control. Nowhere near perfect, of course, but a bit more liveable these days. I've been doing a lot of throwing things out and finding places for other things. There's still quite a bit of moving crap from one pile to another, but I tell myself that at least the piles are getting smaller.

Counseling has started for both boys. We're still in the storytelling, past history stage, so it is hard to know what to make of it. So far he hasn't come up with anything I'm not already doing. Tigger has been doing pretty well at summer camp, I keep hearing all these positive things from the camp counselors, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Pumpkin has been having regular playdates at the home of a former classmate (more on that in a later post).

We're contemplating going to visit our neighbors at their vacation rental in Rangeley Lake, Maine next week. Piper is not thrilled with the idea, but I need to get out of this town and see something new for a couple of days. I need a road trip. I need to feel like I've actually had a vacation this summer. Small town residents and SAHMs everywhere know what I mean.

One thing I haven't been doing much of, in case you hadn't noticed, is writing.

I seem to remember getting into this same kind of writing funk last summer when so many people I was reading were headed to Blogher, all excited about meeting their friends and furthering their opportunities. I have yet to make it to Blogher. Some years it's about the money, some years it's about the time. This year it's both.

The same questions; how serious I am about writing, how far and in what direction I should take it, is the labor and time worth it if nothing ever comes of it, pop up more frequently than I would like. The words justify and deserve pound away at me; the endless guilt about how I should really be spending my time when I'm not bringing in any money. Around and around it goes until I realize that two months have gone by and I have not written a goddamn thing.

That's just got to change.

This is about as close to the writing life as I have ever gotten, but I am far closer to pulling the plug on it than pulling the trigger.

Where the hell did my confidence go?

Did I ever have it in the first place?

"Learning to Dance in the Rain"

An online friend of mine died this week.

She was an administrator of a local message board we have both participated in for over a decade, and I have met her in person maybe a dozen times. We had an interesting connection in that we both considered the town I currently live in and the New Haven, CT area to be home.

It's a strange consequence of a life lived online that I'm not exactly sure how to feel about all of this. I will miss her in a way, mourn her certainly, but mostly, my heart breaks for her family.

Evelyn battled cancer for 6 years; remarkably strong and relatively symptom-free until about two months ago. Over the years, in emails to a smaller group of board members, along with bragging about her grandchildren, she shared tales of her treatments; making the indignities of hospital visits and chemotherapy seem like a hilarious romp through the medical establishment. Her descriptions of bodily functions gone horribly awry were not for the squeamish, but they could make you laugh out loud in the right frame of mind. Humor, it seemed, was her way of fighting back. She was so full of life, it seemed that death might never come.

When it became clear, however, that Evelyn's journey was coming to an end, her husband joined our local message board and began posting updates. Sprinkled in between the reports of "resting comfortably" and family visits were the incredible words of love he had for her and pain at the thought of her not being there. It was those words that moved me the most. We should all be so lucky to experience such an uncommon love, connection, partnership.

As the days progressed, more people shared their prayers, remembrances, and condolences. It became clear that Evelyn had had an impact on far more people than just her family. She was a social worker and counselor at heart; more and more posters recalled a time when she had helped them through a difficult phase or reached out to someone who was struggling. Some of these were people she might not have befriended in real life, whether they knew it or not, yet she was generous enough to read their words and offer advice or a virtual shoulder. That Evelyn's obituary included the fanciful names of family pets among those who survived or predeceased her showed a Buddha-like respect for all sentient beings, and gave us all a final laugh.

Over the past six years, I frequently wondered if I could muster the strength and positive outlook in the face of what Evelyn was dealing with. She recently shared with her family her belief that "life isn't about waiting for the storm to be over, but about learning to dance in the rain."

In one of her last posts on the board, Evelyn left a link she knew I'd be interested in. She was always thinking of others, sharing, even to the end. In the past few days, I have come to believe that a lot of what Evelyn stood for were some of the very things I've been struggling with lately - love, courage, humor, patience, generosity of spirit, running headlong into the winds of a challenge, enjoying the life you have.

It may be that her attitude was her last gift to us, to her family, to anyone she crossed paths with. I will try to keep that spirit with me. Even in the rain.

Mist-ical

The foghorn is so evocative.

It's a sound I have lived with all my life and one that conjures up a host little scenes in my mind.

There's the woman strolling the beach, maybe looking for shells or sea glass, maybe lost in her own thoughts. She is wearing  a heavy woolen sweater against the chill, but her feet are either bare or sandaled. Does she find what she is looking for?

There's the clammer, knee-deep in the muck, gathering the beginnings of a pot of chowder with a large, curved, rake.

There's a couple, clad in shorts, building a fire in their damp cottage and planning to stay out of the foul weather for the day. A good day for reading and board games.

It's the lobsterman, not far from shore, whose puttering boat can be heard but not seen in the enveloping mist.

There's a woman on a bicycle in a bright yellow slicker, bringing back provisions from the market up the road.

It's the bustle of harbor activity in the early morning hours, before the fog burns off and the sun comes out. It's those moments that belong to the locals, long before the tourists have risen.

It's the train, speeding me off the island and into the city, where there is no fog. I think about those friends and neighbors whose work is where they live, and I can't wait to get home.

You can keep my things, they've come to take me home!

You probably recgonize it, but if you don't, it's the last line from Peter Gabriel's Solisbury Hill; a song he supposedly wrote about his decision to leave Genesis.

My take on it is that it's a fairly positive tune about knowing something isn't a good fit for a long time and then finally making a change that's expected to work out better than what you had been doing. In Gabriel's case, he went on to have a very successful solo career, and the band he left also changed direction and had quite a bit of success as well. A good outcome all around!

The song was released when I was a child, but it was still very widely played in the mid 80s, when I was in high school and college. It grew to have real meaning for me when I was about to return to Boston after taking a semester off and living back in Guilford for six months. I learned a lot about myself, but Boston was, at least at the time, where I really belonged.

I've had that song in my head for a while now, and not just because it remains one of my favorite. I've always hated it when bloggers got all cryptic and mysterious about changes that were happening behind the scenes, and now I have to do that as well. At least for now.

Let's put it this way: I'm 42 years old, the older I get, the more I find myself in these "now or never" situations. Increasingly, I'm learning to say "now."

Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie, and Chevrolet

You might need to be over 40 to remember that jingle, but that pretty much describes my weekend. Except the Chevrolet part; unless you count listening to the news.  

Tigger’s introduction to Little League started with a parade; one that he was in along with 100 or so other boys and girls who are about to have the next two months of their lives consumed by baseball.

 

We all met at the fire house and as we were standing around waiting for things to get more organized,  I had the familiar sensation of realizing that all the dads I knew said hello to me and almost all the moms I knew ignored me. I stood around feeling like an idiot watching Tigger fall in with his teammates and begin chattering away, until I realized that the fireman standing behind me was someone I knew and an adoptive parent to boot and at last I had someone to talk to.

 

Eventually, led and followed by fire trucks, the players  marched ambled from the fire house to the baseball field, held a small opening day ceremony where the need for kids and their parents to sell gourmet cookie dough (at $15 a pop!) was emphasized along with the need to place one’s cap over one’s heart for the National anthem.

 

And then there were hot dogs. A few of the parents ran a small concession stand at the ball park. After lunch and before dinner we bought hot dogs and ate them, because they were there, and the grill smelled wonderful and it seemed like the thing to do before we trooped over to the bleachers to watch a round robin of one inning games.

 

And this is where being the parents of two cantsitstill boys becomes a huge challenge. We were forever trying to get Tigger to stay with his team and trying to keep Pumpkin from climbing around under the bleachers (eew!), and I felt like I was corralling children more than I was watching the game and omigod they are 7 and 8 and we should be past all this.

When it was finally Tigger’s turn at bat we watched him swing a dozen times while Piper said things like, “he’s early, he’s got to get that back elbow up, and the pitcher (one of the coaches) is throwing too slowly, they should have had the pitching machine.” Thankfully, Piper was saying these things quietly to me and not yelling them because we are not those kinds of parents, oh no, we are not.

 

When it was our team’s turn to field, we watched one of Tigger’s  female classmates and remarked on how she repeatedly knew what to do with the ball once it came to her (always a problem for me), and how this tiny little girl was going to be a sports powerhouse in some capacity because we’d seen her in several different sports and she always seemed to have what it took right away.

 

It occurred to me that this seemed like a very American way to be spending the day; sitting on the bleachers of a small town ball field watching a game and nibbling on a hot dog and chips. It was at that point that the jingle in the title popped into my head and I started to think “Mmmmm, pie.” 

 

 

Unfortunately, though we had plenty of fruit of both the fresh and frozen variety, we had no pie crusts in the freezer so instead of pie, I made a modernized (read, not fried) version of fish and chips. Amazingly both boys ate it all even though I thought they were going to balk at the balsamic vinegar and garlic sauce, and they’d eaten hot dogs only a couple of hours earlier. Except for slicing my thumb on the mandoline (I’ve had it for years this was the first time I’ve used it, ouch!), the meal was a success. Not as good as pie, but good enough to eat.

I don’t have any Chevys to offer to the story, but we did have a fire truck, courtesy of Pumpkin who walked alongside the pumper all the way to the ball field and studied it carefully and drew it in fine detail the next day. And if I had a scanner, I could share it with you.

What we've been up to

Well, there’s a lot going on, but not really anything I could make a whole post about. Here’s a sampling.

Vacation

Sort of. My grand plans to go to VA Beach, Colonial Williamsburg, and Busch Gardens began to disintegrate when it became clear that the timing was bad for our relatives in the area. All too quickly, “maybe we should get together” turned into “maybe we shouldn’t go at all.”  So instead of taking the whole week off, I worked Monday and Tuesday, thinking that I would get lots of projects done on Wednesday and Thursday before we left for my niece’s Confirmation ceremony in upstate NY.

Instead, I collapsed; didn’t get more than a few loads of laundry and a couple of errands done. One day I slept until 9:30. I can’t remember the last time I did that. Friday, we had every intention of leaving at 8 AM, but didn’t get out of the house until noon.

The five hour trip was relatively painless, but I didn’t pack enough “summer” clothes and we were sweltering in the heat of a place it’s hard to remember is actually south of us. Much warmer, much greener. And so much more rural.

The Catholics are now bowing before Communion. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a Catholic Church, so I asked my MIL about it. She said it was new. You know, I try to be respectful, but I couldn’t help it. “You don’t like that,” she said.  “No, I don’t.”

Yes, we all bow before the altar, and genuflect before entering the pew, but this looks for all the world like we are bowing to the priest. “Don’t worry,” my MIL assured me, “the priest knows you’re not bowing at him.” 

I’m not buying it.

Work

OMG, I have five projects and I’m getting reviewed at the end of the month. I’m mentally exhausted.  I like the job, but there are particular challenges about the culture to which I am struggling to adapt. That’s true of any place, really, this is just a bit more hierarchical than I’m used to. I’m a professional, I’ll work it out, I’m sure.

Therapy

One of the outcomes of the neuropsych testing is a recommendation for therapies for the boys; very different therapies for very different issues. We met with the first step this week and it looks like there’s going to be a “team” involved. I’m not sure how much I’ll write about this because this borders on an invasion of the boys’ privacy, but I’ll just say that while I remain intimidated by the whole process, I am encouraged by the goal setting/strategy approach the therapist talked about. I know people who have been in and out of therapy since childhood with little change. I’m hoping that’s not going to happen to us.

Baseball

Tigger starts baseball this week. Piper and I were looking at the schedule the other night and holy crap, this is quite a commitment. Next weekend he has games on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. What have we done?

Pumpkin will start T-ball in another couple of weeks. I’m hoping he has a little more sticktoitiveness than he showed last year. I’m also hoping he gets the same coach he had for kick-start soccer. The guy is a family friend and also the parent of a kindergartner. He knows the deal with Pumpkin and has shown patience, sometimes more than I have.

Aporkalypse Now

It’s official, the Swine flu makes you crazy. Two kids in Lowell have made the news because they contracted the virus, stayed out of school and so far are not thought to have infected anyone else they came in contact with. You have to love the comment on that article referring to the boys as “yuppy (sic) students” and urging people to call the health department and insist that they release the names of the “culprits.”  And, lest you think that the poster is joking, in my own community someone set off a panic by posting on a local message board that the Board of Health was up at the High School testing students for Swine flu.  NOT true. But a friend of mine who was in Mexico with his family last week was called by other parents and told not to send his kids to school in spite of the fact that they were not sick and the school had made no such stipulation.

My father died from the flu almost 30 years ago, I do take it seriously, but people seem to be acting like this is the plague that’s going to kill in 48 hours. There seems to be no recognition that the people who have died come from a place where the medical care and culture is substandard compared to what we have and expect in the States. The one child who died in the U. S. was from Mexico and had prior health complications. And that’s not even addressing people who want to close the border. Get a grip, people! And lots of fluids.

 

That’s life on the island these days.  I’ve been mucking around with a political post, but I haven’t had time to finish it yet.

My Fridays fall apart

It’s 10:30 at night and I just sent the project I promised to finish today off to the stakeholders. I had planned on finishing way earlier than this, but as so often happens, my Friday fell apart.

 

I spent part of the morning preparing for a telephone call that never happened. The guy I’m dealing with is out in California and has a crazy-busy job, so I was sort of expecting him to cancel, but not to just forget.

 

When it came time to pick up the kids at school, I was nowhere near as far along as I had expected. It is not impossible to get work done after they come home from school, but it is not easy.

 

I bumped into a friend’s kids while at the school to pick up my own. The buses had left so I offered them a ride home knowing that their mom wasn’t home yet. One of the boys got his mom on the phone and that became a discussion of whether we could all meet and go out for pizza. Since I hadn’t had lunch, pizza sounded good to me, but I also knew I had this project waiting for me at home.

 

The boys decided that they wanted to stay and play on the playground rather than have pizza so, grateful that it was finally warm enough to hang out on the playground, that’s what we did. The older boys took Tigger into the woods with a bunch of other kids and discovered a “snapping turtle pond.” I think they were just kidding about the snapping turtle, but somehow Tigger managed to get wet up to his knees and tear a hole in the leg of his good pants.

 

Meanwhile Pumpkin found friends to play with. It never ceases to amaze me how he attracts other children.

 

While watching Pumpkin on the playground, I texted a question to another friend of mine. I expected a one-word answer in return, but instead I got a phone call. He was driving, he said, going away for the weekend, and couldn’t text back.

 

Going away for the weekend.

 

When we first moved up here from Newton, I was doing a drive commute instead of taking the train. Every Friday I would see a sign for 95N NH, MAINE and every Friday I would contemplate following that sign and not coming back. Maine in those days was my idea of heaven. The air was cleaner, the stress non-existent. Of course I never went.

 

Now I work at home on Fridays and while it is great that I am no longer part of the throngs of people on the road who are going away for the weekend, thus jamming the drive home commute even worse than usual, I am often frustrated that there is no clear line between when my work stops and the weekend begins. The kids were playing on the playground, my friend was going away, and I still had work to do.

 

Piper made dinner tonight. I came downstairs long enough to take a few bites, forego the beer we usually share on Friday nights and get back to work.

 

I finished at 10:30 at night.

 

My weekend has just begun.