twirt

These are good:

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/50477/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/weekinreview/21scott.html?scp=1&sq=wallace&st=cse

it becomes clearer and clearer to me as we proceed along that Marx had it pretty much nailed:  in a capitalist society, democratic government necessarily represents the interests of the capitalists.  You can try to mitigate the harshness on the proletariat with regulations and oversight and stuff like that, but in the end, the interests being served are those of the folks that own the means of production, and who need to be able to collect labor’s surplus value in order for those magic GDP numbers to keep pinging.

When I read stuff like this:

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Paulson, facing a second day of questioning by lawmakers, this time before the House Financial Services Committee, tried to focus as much on Main Street as Wall Street.

“This entire proposal is about benefiting the American people because today’s fragile financial system puts their economic well being at risk,” Mr. Paulson said. Without action, he added: “Americans’ personal savings and the ability of consumers and business to finance spending, investment and job creation are threatened.”

All I can think about is the myopia with which the USW hitched its wagon to USX in the 60s and 70s — and you see it here in Pgh even now, and in SWPA and WV with the coal industry and the UMW — in which the interests of the labor unions get subsumed into the interests of the companies the unions work for, until we’re all working frantically to keep the capitalists from taking a bath in the shitstorm they created lest the mills close and we all lose our shirts.  Ironically, the orthodox free-market wackos agree that the capitalists have to assume all the risk when they play with their money, and are objecting to the bailout on behalf of the taxpayers.  (The wackos just also think the bourgeoisie should get to keep all the winnings when they come up holding the flush — which of course makes logical sense but makes for a very unjust society.)

But of course all of this just illustrates Marx’s point.

Sigh.

As you all probably know by now, David Foster Wallace died of depression last week.  I’ve been musing about this ever since I saw the notice over the weekend, and it’s been very confusing and very sad.

At first I had trouble even comprehending the news, because it made no sense to me that someone with so vital and keen a voice, and so much evident talent for hyper-contextualizing his point of view, should choose to commit suicide — which some part of me has always thought to be a terribly selfish way to die.  I’d never heard that he’d been depressed, or that he’d taken medical leave from his position at Pomona to deal with his depression, which had apparently stopped responding to his medications.

Reading his parents’ reactions in various obituary notices has been equal parts distressing (my mom-strings are all reverberating in sympathetic harmonies) and comforting (because they seem to understand why he did it and don’t blame him for not being able to cope with the disease any longer). It’s also been somewhat of a revelation, because I’m finally getting it that people whose depression drives them to commit suicide are actually succumbing to a disease the same way people who die of cancer or any other illness would.  Rather than cut off your oxygen, depression cuts off your options, and renders life too painful to endure.

But I’m still in that bargaining stage of grief wherein I’m wondering what might have been done to prevent this from happening.  I read Mimi Smartypants’ post on DFW last night before bed and followed her links to this story, which didn’t make me cry but did make me think; and then last night I had a very vivid wish-fulfillment dream:  in it I found a wormhole (bizarrely, that I accessed by crawling out the old window of my parents’ third-floor landing, which no longer exists) to DFW’s childhood home, circa 1974, and I got to meet and befriend young David before he had any inkling that he’d grow up to be a writer, or famous, or a widely-regarded genius. In my dream, I was very conflicted about telling him that I knew who he was, or that he was destined for any of this tortured greatness — all I wanted was for him to keep in touch with me in the future somehow, and to let me know that he was ok.  At one point I did tell him, I know who you are because in the future I come from you’re a very famous writer — but I also said, you know you shouldn’t think that that’s your only choice, now.  You can still choose to be anything you want to be.  There are always options.  But in my head even though I was telling him this, I was wondering if by seeding his imagination with alternative futures I was basically un-writing Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing, etc., and is that the right thing to do?  He has to work it out for himself, I kept telling myself.  But at the same time it was just inexpressibly comforting to befriend this little kid with no idea about his destiny.  I still don’t know exactly why.

I woke up feeling melancholy about it, though.  Like all vivid dreams, it took several hours for the plausibility of it to wear off, and it wasn’t until mid-morning that I could think clearly enough to see that duh, a wormhole back to 1974 is totally impossible, and that I shouldn’t be thinking about trying to find one.  Nevermind that the whole visit-from-the-future wouldn’t really help avert the end, either.

I have no trouble confessing that I actually hated Infinite Jest.  I resisted reading it for ages out of principle, because  I resented the idea that here was some guy who theoretically had defined the voice of my generation, and what did that mean, anyway? But after a friend had insisted to me that I read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, I quickly saw that DFW was of course brilliant, and immediately decided to give IJ the benefit of the doubt, and launched right in.  It took me I think about a week and a half to read it, and when I was finished I wanted to hunt him down and kill him.  1,400+/- pages, seven distinct storylines, and not a single damned thing is actually resolved at the end of the book. It’s suspenseful, and very rich — and I read it hungrily, the way one reads a good mystery story; but unlike a mystery, there was no denouement and no explanation for anything that had happened in the book, and no real clue as to the ultimate fate of any of the main characters.  And I’d actually remained hopeful that there would be some revelation or explanation, up until the very, very end.

Maybe that’s the metaphor then for how I should think about DFW’s death, then.

But I keep coming back to this bit from ASFTINDA:

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir — especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased — I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.

And then this:

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable — if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.

It’s that last bit though - you do have to try to live with those choices and consequences. Don’t you?

I don’t know what else to say except that I’ll miss all the books DFW won’t write, and the world is rather bleaker for me without him in it, though I never met him.  He was a “friend of the mind,” as only a great writer can be.

Yesterday I went to a PHLF-sponsored lecture/tour of the stained glass and architecture of East Liberty Presbyterian Church.  It was disappointingly boring, which was frustrating since it wouldn’t have taken much to make it fascinating, but that’s beside the point, really.  Most of the blow-by-blow “and in 1867 he moved back to Scotland where he married, blah blah blah” type details of the lecture I ignored completely, but one very simple and probably well-known fact that really struck me is that the present church building was in fact the fifth church built on that site in the course of about 100 years.  And there wasn’t much wrong with the 4th building, either — not like the previous structures burned down or anything.  They just wanted a bigger building, so they demolished the old church and built this:

It’s a really amazing building — a little city unto itself, with countless meeting rooms and classrooms and nooks-of-contemplation and a basketball court (seriously!) and a few courtyards (one with a playground for their nursery school), in addition to an enormous sanctuary space and a few chapels.  And it’s all built of solid masonry with careful attention to detail in copious wood and stone carvings, stained glass, etc., etc.  I’d never been in the sanctuary or chapel spaces before — we even got to climb the bell tower, which was fun — and boring lecture aside, the tour was definitely worth the time.  I wouldn’t say that the stained glass is really my taste (very conservative, iconographic, trying to be medieval but with 1920’s and 1930’s sensibility), but it’s excellently well done nevertheless.

But I kept pondering the fact that the building was commissioned to take the place of a perfectly serviceable other building on the same site, and that no expense was spared in the design and construction of the thing — Mr. Mellon paid for it all, and wanted the finished church to be as impressive as possible.

Who would do that today?  Even the wealthiest of congregations would never be able to afford to build such a thing, let alone tear down an existing building to do it — and you don’t see the Bill Gateses and Warren Buffets and George Soroses of the world sinking their cash into neo-gothic masterpieces.   I think about the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, which has been muddling along in its ambitious gothic self-actualization for over a hundred years, and it’s only half completed now.  Heck, many of the great actually-Gothic cathedrals in Europe took several generations to complete.  But East Liberty Pres was built in just four years (1931-1935).

The significance of which four years those were didn’t really occur to me until this morning, when Zen and I walked out for our morning constitutional and passed the PDPW tractor on its way to mow Oakland Square.   In answer to Zen’s “de dah?” I said automatically, “That’s a tractor, baby - the city tractor is coming to cut the grass on the square.”  We watched it mosey past at its grandmotherly pace of 10 mph and I thought, jesus, the city sends that thing here through city streets from over a mile away once a week — what’s the carbon footprint of keeping the square mowed? Couldn’t we just get some goats or something?

In India I remember being struck the first time I saw tiny city grass plots being mowed by small teams of men using a buffalo and a long rotary mower.  In India, of course, labor is extremely cheap — disconcertingly so — and furthermore the government seems to make it a priority to employ as many people as possible, so seeing 3 or 4 guys doing a job that one American would do among a dozen other responsibilities was hardly uncommon for me.  I once spent half an hour watching a fireline of maybe two dozen women in bright saris pour concrete for a high-rise in Madras — the concrete was mixed by hand on the ground, then hoisted by the bucketful on a rope pulley up to the top of the building (8 storeys? 10?), where it was added to a hopper and then doled out by the platterful to these women who would scoop the platters of concrete up onto their heads and walk over to the spot on the opposite side of the roof where the concrete was to be laid, dumping their platters and walking back to the hopper. Their neck muscles must have been impressive.

But the point is that human labor there is much cheaper than machinery or the costs of operating and maintaining machinery.  A stone crusher costs money, and then it runs on gas which also costs money — whereas a team of dalits wearing dhotis breaking rocks with hammers and sifting gravel through different grades of mesh is dirt cheap.

And as I mused on this I was reminded of a remark that my stained glass instructor Catherine made, the first time I took her class in restoration at the Union Project:  because the UP’s windows were built when labor was much cheaper relative to the cost of the glass, the builders couldn’t afford to be choosy about what glass was too difficult to work with — so they’d spend lots of time widening came channels and working the lead to fit around uneven butt-ends of glass in many cases, whereas today one would probably just discard such end-bits to save the labor.

And then this reminded me of when East Liberty Pres was built — the height of the Great Depression.  Sure, Mr. Mellon could afford an army of wood carvers and stone masons and glaziers and engineers to work like bees, and probably they were all really happy to have the work.

Since Zen and I were well on our walk at that point, and I was already musing on this blog post, I decided to detour by way of Heinz Chapel (built 1933-1938) to try and get some pictures of the kinds of effort involved in making crap glass work in a window.  It’s a little hard to photograph stained glass on a sunny day, and I only had my iphone camera, so the pics aren’t very clear; but here’s the base of one of the north transept windows –

and here are some details of that bottom panel:

I guess it’s still hard to tell.  Take it from me — it’s some crap glass.  Bottle-thick on one side and chip-thin on the other, in many cases — and the preponderance of itty bitty painted pieces is really impressive.  Virtually every piece has been painted.  Insanely labor-intensive. I hope Pitt employs a team of glaziers to come re-cement the windows every 15 years or so, because they’d really take a hit if they had to pay to have them re-leaded.

On the walk over to the chapel Zen and I passed several other excellent examples of labor-saving devices that are just hell on the natural resources — a Pitt sprinkler that only managed to get about 30% of its water onto the plants it was showering, the rest washing the sidewalk for several feet around was one, but I didn’t get a picture.  We paused in front of the panther fountain at the Cathedral of Learning to watch the water (Z loves fountains)…

… and I couldn’t help but notice that the pavement all around the fountain was sopping wet:

(can’t see it there?  try here:)

– another example of groundskeepers watering the sidewalk. I even watched the guy coil up his hose.  Why should they have to water the flowers around the fountain, when the water is pouring down right next to the flowers 24 hours a day?  Couldn’t there be some kind of drip-irrigation or sponge that would let the flowers drink from the pool?

All of this — the lawn mowers, the sprinklers, the craftsmanship of the 1930s — is just adding to the grist I’ve been tumbling around in my brain about the coming end of civilization (as Kunstler would have it):  the end of oil.  Abby and Natalia and Janis and I went door-knocking for a Democrat in Moon Township on Saturday, and all of us were a little creeped out by the suburbanity of the neighborhoods we were working in (cul-de-sacs and long windy streets, obvious ordinances about lawn maintenance and so forth — but at least there were sidewalks!) and we mused about this on the ride back to the city.  What’s going to become of places like that once no one can afford to drive, or to run the many devices that save labor but waste resources?  Heck, what’s going to become of the city’s public works department, or the grass on Oakland Square?

I really think we should be getting some goats.

(that pic was taken at the MD Sheep & Wool Festival — and this reminds me, I need to be getting organized about Rhinebeck.  Anyone want to join me?)

So G & I thought we were ahead of the game by submitting an application for childcare at the Waldorf School a full 5 months ahead of time, but duh, no:  they contacted us a few weeks ago to let us know they’d filled all (17? 18?) spaces for the fall and we were 26th on the waiting list.  They regretted to say that it was pretty “unlikely” that we’d be able to get in.

On the one hand, I’m totally delighted that there’s so much support for the Waldorf here, and that there are parents out there excited about getting their kids into the program, since it means there must be (at least 30-35) moms in our immediate vicinity with toddlers Zen’s age who’re down with the arty Waldorf educational philosophy — potential friends!

On the other hand, damn them for getting there ahead of us, and who exactly are we competing against, here?  Where are all these arty moms, are they actually here in Pittsburgh?  Can I meet them?  Do they push unaffordable strollers and obsess about cleanliness and are they trend-conscious in their interest in Waldorf, or are they actually real people who eat meat and dress their kids in hand-me-downs and take public transit?

More specifically, do they say they live in Pittsburgh but actually live in places like Mount Lebanon and Fox Chapel?  Because that’s just not cool.

This post is a rant but it’s not anything to do with the Waldorf — really it’s to do with this aggravating trend in which young professionals looking to start a family avoid the City of Pittsburgh like the plague, talk trash about its horrendous public schools and crumbling infrastructure, but of course all the while they all work in the city and commute in by car every day, shop at Whole Foods and visit museums and theaters and sports events and so forth, availing themselves of culture and city services they never have to pay for.  And of course if you ask them they all say they’re from Pittsburgh.

Take the well-intentioned www.pittsburghmom.com, which appears to be a site where Pittsburgh mothers can connect with each other to consult about local playgrounds and schools and daycare and family-friendly restaurants, etc., maybe set up playgroups and make new friends (which is why I just signed up — I’m looking for all those things).  Check out the discussion boards, though, and it seems like 99% of the people using the site live in the suburbs.  One post from a woman looking for information about Pittsburgh in advance of a possible future move here from Ohio asked for recommendations about neighborhoods and schools and so forth — and not a single one of the replies even deigned to consider what’s available in the city.  Have you looked at Fox Chapel and the Avonworth schools?  We love it here in Mount Lebanon and Cranberry.  There’s so much available in the Monroeveille/Plum area.  Meanwhile I’m all, but if you’re going to be working at UPMC, why not live in Oakland?  or Squirrel Hill or Shadyside, if Oakland is too declassé for you.  Is this for real?  Where are all the Pittsburgh moms, exactly?

I’m looking ahead to the fall when I’m planning to stop working for a little bit in order to Mom full-time, and getting nervous.  It feels like a little bit of a luxury to be able to stay home, after all — we’re able to squeak by on G’s income, and we don’t have to hustle like we did in New York just to make rent, so as far as we’re concerned we’re rich, and this staying-at-home plan is something of an indulgence.  In theory, at least, we’d be even better off if I worked full time, right?  But in reality I’m beginning to doubt that.

I learned from experience in New York that the more you work, and the better paid you are for that work, the more money you spend, and the less time you actually have to yourself.  Within an order of magnitude, the marginal return on a pay increase is a fraction of the actual difference in pay level.  You spend more time at work, and when you’re done you don’t have a lot of mental energy to do stuff like housework and errands and body maintenance and other chores, let alone spend quality time with your family and fun stuff like cultural events, etc., so you buy things and contract for services in an effort to make your life more enjoyable or convenient or efficient.  Life gets more expensive.

Here in Pittsburgh it’s maybe even more the case — because the payscales for the non-profit work that I do are pretty low, and the difference between what I make per hour and what we pay our babysitter, for example, isn’t a whole lot.  I could work more, but I’d have to pay for full-time childcare and probably also a housekeeper (to avoid going completely insane); and then I’d also have much less time to bargain-hunt when shopping for food or clothing or other necessities; not to mention the fact that I’d have very little time to interact with G given his chaotic round-the-clock schedule; and of course I’d be doing all this while giving someone else the privilege of playing with my baby.  It really doesn’t seem worth it, and ironically I feel like I’d actually be able to save money by not working at all.

But I don’t want to deprive Zen of the company of kids his own age, even if I’m able to give him much more of my attention — which brings me back to whole issue of signing up for daycare and looking for playgroups and moms of toddlers Zen’s age, and the mysteries of being a mom in Pittsburgh.  Like many cities, Pittsburgh has many excellent daycare programs that are all over-subscribed, with long waiting lists; but unlike many other cities, Pittsburgh doesn’t actually have many kids.  Enrollment in the public and parochial schools is declining drastically, and there’s a big demographic hole where the 25-to-40-year-olds are supposed to be, here. 

Which leads me to be very suspicious about the fact that we’re 26th on the waiting list at the Waldorf.  If there are that many kindred-spirit moms in Pittsburgh, how come I don’t know any of them?  Am I totally out of touch?  I can’t help but think we’re competing with families from the snazzy suburbs who’re up on the Reggio Emilia trend, here.  Makes me want to stalk the pick-up lines for the Little Friends program this fall, just to see how many kids are being fetched in SUVs with suburban stickers.  Grrrrr.

I could be totally wrong, of course.  I’d be happy to be wrong.  Maybe this fall I’ll have the time to sleuth out the hidden meet-ups of 30-something really-from-Pittsburgh moms with second-hand strollers and good recipies for kale and butternut squash, and I’ll cheerfully print a retraction to this rant.  But until then…

When I was a kid we had two air conditioners in our house:  one on the first floor, where my grandparents lived, and one in my parents’ bedroom.  I remember a few rare nights when the heat was so unbearable that I slept on the floor of my parents’ room — but that was when I was really little, and it didn’t happen often.  Mostly, I slept in front of a fan, and was brought up to believe that if the fan blew directly on my head all night that I’d almost certainly develop a sinus infection — so the fan was never really blowing ON me, it was sort of blowing PAST me. 

It was hot.

I’m not saying this out of any kind of nostalgia — it sucked, pretty much, and I was really envious of my parents that they had the air conditioner, though I didn’t feel like the arrangement was unfair or anything.  Resources were really limited in our family, and obviously air conditioning was expensive, and so there it was:  there could only be one unit, and it had to go somewhere, so it went in my parents’ room.

I remember days spent improvising cooling devices.  I set up a floor fan in my room, taped a sheet all around its perimeter, weighted the edges of the sheet down with books, and sat in the resulting air-inflated tent for hours, reading books and napping.  (I actually do recall having sinus trouble after a few episodes of falling asleep with my head a few inches from the fan like that, but whatever.)  Or I’d turn the air conditioner on in my parents’ room and curl up in front of it on the window seat, letting the cold air blow straight on the back of my neck, and drink glass after glass of instant lemonade with a lot of ice.  Of course we had a wading pool, but no sprinkler; one could shoot water up from the hose and run under it, but there was always the issue of wasting water (these were the Carter years,* after all!), so we didn’t do a whole lot of that.  There was the neighborhood public pool, but it was always really crowded and (is still now) shadeless, so that inevitably if we went swimming I ended up feeling hot anyway after drying off and walking home.  Mostly, I remember heat-beating remedies at home.

(* - I was trying to find some page about the “Mickey and Goofy Explore Energy Conservation” comic book I remember from my childhood — you know the one, where Goofy explains how important it is to take shorter showers and to turn off the lights when you leave the room? — and holy moly, did you know that book was produced by Exxon?  Someone should tell Mr. Tillerman.)

All the time that I lived in New York, I didn’t have an air conditioner, either.  In New York I came to resent air conditioners:  they expell hot air onto the sidewalk and make the already unbearably oppresive heat rising from the softened asphalt of the street just feel like injustice.  I did learn about the strategies of taking advantage of public air conditioning as a way of dealing with the heat, though.  Too hot in your apartment?  Go shopping!  Go to the movies!  Go to a museum or a cafe!

The summer after graduation I subletted a space in a fifth-floor walk-up apartment with my friends Gina and Dawn.  The space I slept in was a storage loft above the galley kitchen; I had a little fan up there and mostly it was ok for sleeping, though there were a few episodes that stand out in my memory.  One morning I woke up almost delirious with the heat and could barely think clearly enough to be able to diagnose my disorientation as stemming from the fact that it had to be over 120°F in my little loft.  I hitched my way over to the ladder and swung my legs over, gasping; and right below me was Gina, blithely baking muffins.  It didn’t even dawn on me.  I just said, “God is it hot!” and Gina looked up at me, and looked down at the muffins she was baking, and then looked up at me again and said, “Yes!  You should maybe take a shower!”

Later that summer, on a weekend when both Gina and Dawn were out of town, I woke up feeling hot and stupid, came down from my loft and sat on the floor of the living room, and glommed onto the one rational thought I was able to form in my head:  I need to get out of the apartment, and I shall walk down Broadway until I find a sunhat for sale for less than $20, then I shall turn left and walk to Central Park.  So I did:  I packed a jar of lemonade, walked out of the apartment at 100th St and Riverside Drive, walked over to Broadway and down to somwhere in the mid-80s before I found a store that sold me a nice broad-brimmed hat for $19.99; then I walked into Central Park, made it to Summer Stage, and fainted.  When I came to, I could think only, “I need to go to the movies.”  So I walked east to Lexington, got on the subway, rode to Houston, went into the Angelika and saw the next thing playing — which happened to be Orlando, a movie whose surreality was really all that my fried brain could have handled.  After it ended, I felt much better, and walked to the 1/9 line feeling like a movie star in my new hat, with my almost-like-new air-conditioned brain, feeling light (headed?) and awake.

The point of the story, though, becomes apparent when you check the map:  I walked 3.2 miles in 100°+F heat before I thought it would be prudent to get on the fucking subway or find some air conditioning.  Hot is dumb.

We don’t have air conditioners in our house now, either, and yesterday and today have been hot enough to cook my brain into mush — so it’s not surprising I did another stupid thing today.  At 3:30 I couldn’t stand it anymore, we had to get out of the house, and even though Golan was happily coding away in front of the fan I made a fuss and bundled us all into the car where I promptly turned on the air conditioning, picked a direction and drove vaguely off.  I didn’t really start thinking straight until we got to Lawrenceville (where we bought an iced coffee) — even then, I made a lot of bad driving decisions and we meandered aimlessly around.  The carbon footprint of us cooling off this afternoon was pretty high — but how great is it to treat the family to an hour or so of air conditioning?  Worth any amount of future climate change!

Sigh.

I’ve been simultaneously amused and distressed by the stupidity of global warming politics these days.  Gas is now $3.99 a gallon (but it’s going higher, of course, and soon) — now the pols who understand about peak oil and climate change are in a bind because how do you really break it to your constituents that the way to make life better in the long run is to make gas even more expensive?  Not surprising the Boxer-Lieberman bill died in the Senate, and as weak and ineffectual as it was I suppose it’s just as well… but it really makes you wonder what the turning point is going to be.  When will the senior senator from Kentucky be taking the floor to say “my constituents are paying $5 or $6 or $10 a gallon and by GOD we have to make sure that price keeps going up until they stop acting like a certain airhead in Pittsburgh who drives her family around on unnecessary shopping trips just to stay cool in the summer!”?

The fault, my friends, is in our house, not in our selves.  Or at least the house bears equal responsibility, here.  We live in a little kit-built house from the early 1950s, a brick-clad framed cube that’s perched on the edge of the virgin hillside fronting Schenley Park.  There are so, so many things about the house that are heartbreaking to me — the fact that it has a lovely park as its back yard but no windows from which to appreciate the view, for example.  But in the summertime we suffer from the fact that the walls are really poorly insulated (if they were ever insulated at all, the loft of the fill material tamped down long ago — the wall cavities are basically empty), the ceilings are low, and the windows are all single-pane aluminum casements (many with sheared-off operator hinges and broken locks) — in other words, our little brick cube can heat up like a kiln.  And those casements?  Impossible to fit with a standard window air conditioner.

Golan was reading over my shoulder as I typed the word “heartbreaking” in the paragraph above, and he snapped, only 3/4 kidding, ”I’m sorry you don’t like the house.”  I actually like living here a lot, but the house itself has never had a lot of charm for me.  Sorry, Golan.  It’s a home, and I love my family, and the location couldn’t be much better — but I wrestle with this house a lot.  And we can’t afford to re-build everything that’s wrong with it.  So we endure, and I complain.

This year, I think we can resolve:  we’ll replace two windows, and fill the walls with blown-in insulation.  And maybe we’ll buy an air conditioner to put in one of the new windows.  And, you know, contribute to the global problem.

I dropped a little chunk of change at the May Market this year and bought:

• two french tarragons
• one exotic-looking marigold I’ve since lost the tag for and therefore can’t name
• two strawberry bowls each containing 4 (fruiting!) plants
• one tiny lavender
• one summer savory
• one winter savory
• one rhubarb plant with three crowns
• one miss kim lilac
• one orange azalea
• one bag of azalea food

… and that’s on top of the 6 excellent heirloom tomato plants that Christine picked up for me in Blairsville last week.

The herbs will comforably go into my raised bed, and won’t turn their little noses up at the exceptionally poor soil therein; but I’m still not sure where I’m going to plant the tomatoes or the strawberries or the rhubarb.  And I’m still debating about where exactly the lilac and the azalea will go in the front yard.  I still have a butterfly bush I bought two summers ago sitting patiently in its pot by the front steps, waiting to go into the ground — but bless its weedy heart, it’s been thriving on my utter neglect.

My house has a fair amount of yard, but for whatever reason I’ve had a lot of trouble making use of it.  I’d pretty much like to change everything, but where to begin?  Soon after we moved in in 2005, I declared war on the ivy that was covering the south wall of our driveway, and began ripping it out.  This ivy had apparently been planted at the same time the house was built in the early 1950s, and had long ago consumed pretty much any dirt that had been available behind the driveway wall — what had looked from the surface to be an ivy covering of a high bed turned out to be a very tall pile of ivy roots and a sprinkling of soil.  Then, of course, removing the ivy exposed the fact that a large portion of the driveway wall had collapsed who only knows when — so naturally the plans of planting up the ivy bed had to be put on hold until the wall could be re-built. 

The wall is still not re-built.  The waste stone it was originally built with has been carefully sorted according to thickness and distributed in piles that are still occupying our garage.  With the totally humbling help of my dear friend Bob we got the first three or four courses laid before the nightmarishness of building with waste stone totally kicked our asses and we basically gave up.  I persist in believing I’m going to just rebuild the fucker at some point soon, but the thing is, when?

Meanwhile, of course, the denuded bank has become a big forest of weeds — I can’t plant it up properly without a wall to hold it together, and the ivy has been ground into little bits for mulch, so basically the jewel weed, thistles, dandelions and switchgrass have been having free rein for two years.  I feel so sorry for my kind and patient neighbors, I really do.  If I were them I’d have called the authorities on me long ago.  Remind me sometime to tell you the sad sorry saga of the Dirt, the remnants of which are still choking the north wall of the driveway, choking out the grape hyacinth that had naturalized there.

And then there’s the question of what to do with the hedge.  I hate the hedge, I wish it gone — but I’ve learned from the ivy experience that I had better do my homework before I go ripping it out without a good thing to put in its place.  Two years ago I ripped out one hedge plant to allow a volunteer maple sapling that had clearly rooted there many years ago to finally grow, and now I have a maple sapling about ten feet high interrupting the hedgeline along the driveway.  What next?  I want the lilac (and hopefully future lilac friends) to border the sidewalk, I think.  And the butterfly bush.

The biggest obstacle to planting up a garden is the lawn, I think.  Lawn saps the imagination as well as the energy/motivation required to get out there and plant things.  It’s a big blank canvas, basically, but one in which changing even a square inch requires cutting through turf that hasn’t been disturbed since the house was first built.  And the soil that’s under all that grass is, I’m guessing, really not great.  And part of me is anxious about disturbing the surface of any part of my rear yard, lest I hasten the day when the hillside collapses and takes half our house with it.  Let’s hear it for the Pennsylvania red beds and our tragically eroding hillside!

Regardless, though, I’m resolved to get these plants into the ground at some point this week, and am hoping Zen cooperates by letting me get some yard work done.

2/3 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/3 cup white flour
2 T flax meal
1/2 t salt
1 T baking powder
4 heaping spoonfuls of sugar
grated zest from 1 lemon

mix all that together well.  cut in:

7 T butter

in a measuring cup, beat together:

1 jumbo egg
milk enough to make 3/4 cup with the egg

beat the egg+milk into the dry ingredients until thoroughly mixed.
take a small handful of dough in one hand, and a small handful of:

chopped fresh strawberries

in the other — press the strawberries into the dough and form a kind of ball/pocket.  Drop onto a buttered baking sheet.  Repeat with rest of dough and strawberries (this recipe used I’d say about 1 cup of chopped strawberries, but whatever — you can also use frozen fruit, other berries, etc. — I was just trying to make use of the quart of berries I had that were too old to be much good for eating straight).  Makes about 6-8 scones.

Bake at 425F for 15-16 minutes.  Glaze (if desired) with:

1 T lemon juice mixed with
4 T powdered sugar

belatedly responding to Katie’s generous comment on my inagural post, here are a few things that little Z has been working on lately:

• walking.  Z actually spontaneously walked across the room about a month ago:  with no prompting from anyone, he got up and walked over to his great-grandma to hand her the toy he was holding, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  And then later that same evening, when his daddy came home, in response to my “show daddy how you can walk!” he smiled, turned, and walked about 10 feet over to his dada, like it was no big thing; and then sat happily in his dada’s arms surveying the room, enjoying all the shrieks of amazement and slack-jawed holy-shit expressions on our faces.  But then of course he refused to perform after that, and would only occasionally stagger a few steps here and there, preferring his crab-crawl to scoot from place to place — for weeks, he’s mostly been crawling.  But then, since two days ago or so, it’s mostly walking.  Which is, you know, Wow.
• eating.  Berries are the food of the gods, did you know?  All the baby gods love berries.  Love to disembowel strawberries with thumb, forefinger and incisors, soak sleeves and shirtfront in berry juice, rub blueberry bits into hair and eyebrows and ears.  (My mother points out that berry juice stains can be removed handily with boiling water.  I thought of this as I regarded my berry-juice stained hands this afternoon, thinking, really?  Yikes.)  Z’s love for berries came to my attention a few weeks ago while shopping at Whole Foods — they had a free sample tray of mixed fruit offering melon and blackberries and I took a blackberry and absentmindedly offered it to Z, as I pushed the cart towards the next aisle.  Looking down, I realized he had swallowed the first bite and was straining with every available muscle to reach the rest of the berry, which was tantalizingly just out of reach in my distracted free hand.  So I fed him the rest of the berry, and I have to confess the mess his face was in afterwards was actually just as charming as his unselfconsciously physical enjoyment of the thing.  Babies really get INto it, you know?  Revel in the whole body experience of food.  I’m reminded of that South Indian saying that eating food with a knife and fork is like making love through an interpreter.  It’s like that.
• playing ball.  His djido bought him a big pink nubbly rubber ball, and has taught him to play catch.  For a one-year-old, he’s surprisingly good.  Actually, he’s a goddamn prodigy.  He can catch the ball on the up-bounce, and throw it to you.  Most of the time.  Clearly, we’re going to have to set him up with some ball-playing friends in a year or two.  Midget midget soccer.  Can you just imagine what that’d be like?
• humming.  He doesn’t have much range, but he has an eerily good sense of pitch, and can most-of-the-time match the tone you sing at him, and sing it back.  “uhhhhhh” — just a single tone, not a melody, but it’s definitely sung, not uttered.  All that time his daddy has been encouraging him to bang on the piano may finally be paying off.
• getting bigger.  Doctor’s appointment was today:  Z is 30 1/2″ tall and weighs 21 pounds.  All that black coffee I’ve been feeding him isn’t working, clearly.

No words yet, really.  I read somewhere that babies focus on mastering one thing at a time, and that if they’re working on walking properly they don’t talk, and if they’re working on talking they don’t walk.  Z’s been plugging away at the mobility thing for a little while now, but he’s also been driving us all crazy for weeks now pointing at things and demanding to know what they’re called, but then not really trying to repeat what we say. 

“de Dah?”
“That’s a bottle.”
“de Dah?”
“Window.” 
“de Dah?” 
“Kitty cat!”
etc. 

The other day I thought I’d be a wiseass and insist that he at least try to say “doorknob” before I’d let him play with it (his favorite thing to do while sitting in my lap in the rocking chair in his room — reach over and play with the doorknob.  Go figure).  

“de Dah?” 
“Doorknob, baby, that’s a doorknob.  Door…. knob.  You can say it.”
“de Dah?!”
“Door knob!” 
“de Dah?!??!?”
“Door… knob.” 

I didn’t last but a few minutes into the screaming before I gave in and let him play with the doorknob anyhow.  Small wonder he isn’t learning to talk, I’m such a pushover. 

It seems to me in comparison with other kids he’s a quiet little guy, and he smiles a lot at adults, looking for smiles back.  It’s hard for me to judge, because we don’t know that many one-year-olds, but the few we’ve played with have mostly been more active and vocal than Z, or so it’s seemed to me.  Very hard to tell.  I need to get this kid some playmates, sigh.  He spends too much time with me and G individually, and only children that we are we’re not always aware of how little we’re actually speaking when we’re playing with him, since he doesn’t talk.  We’re both so accustomed to playing silently by ourselves, and we’re inadvertantly raising our kid to do the same.

But then, wasn’t it Pascal who said that all of the evils of society are the result of men’s inability to sit quietly in a room?  Maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all.

Nah, I’d rather he actually wander in the world, than like Pascal be confined, infirm and bitter, to the house.  Get out there, kid.  Play ball.  Stuff your face with blackberries.  Make new friends.  Come home dirty, and tired, and happy.  That’s the ticket.

Who shall blame him, if, so standing for a moment, he dwells upon fame, upon search parties, upon cairns raised by grateful followers over his bones? Finally, who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition, if, having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now perceives by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on the whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky, and some one to tell the story of his suffering to at once?  Who shall blame him?  Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her — who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?