Family Nonsense

‘Get in the back seat if you want to wiggle your behind’

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‘My priceless Mom. And her priceless Momisms’

When I was a kid, I had a hard time picturing my mom in any role other than ‘Mom’. She would tell us about The Time When I Was In School. And we knew that, sometime in the foggy past, she Had Been A Nurse.

That’s why I  was (and still am) absolutely fascinated by the picture at the top of this post.

There’s Mom, whispering to Dad at some gathering of gorgeous young people who were, no doubt, also Moms and Dads. (I’m pretty sure that the leggy lady on the left ‘belonged’ to our pal Teresa.) But they look, well, rather off-duty here.

Who were Mom and Dad looking at? What was Mom saying? (Whatever it was, it must have been funny; he has a rather amused look on his face, doesn’t he?) Continue reading

Gimme a kiss. I’m goin’ to work(!)

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‘Embracing Working Momhood without (too much) guilt’

It’s been ages since I felt guilty about working. Nowadays, I’m much more likely to feel guilty about not working. You know, whiling away my afternoons on a chaise longue (which Google, for some reason wants to correct to chaise ‘lounge’) in a filmy peignoir, flipping through trashy magazines while nibbling on chocolates bought with The Dude’s hard-earned money. (Actually, my non-working afternoons are more likely to be spent in the company of SoftScrub.)

But, back when The Child was an actual child, I used to feel guilty about working. My guilty feelings weren’t so much about leaving her adorable self in the care of others (though she was pretty darned adorable, as you can see):

Super-adorable Baby Child, about to be left by Heartless Selfish Mother (Me)

Super-adorable Baby Child, about to be left in the care of Another Person, not her Heartless Selfish Mother (Me)

Nope. My guilty feelings arose because I, um, actually preferred going to an actual workplace and interacting with other adults to hanging around all day with a pre-verbal non-ambulatory person, adorable though she might be. As you may already know from reading some of my other stories, like ‘Gone Baby Gone’, I used to say ‘Hey, if didn’t enjoy getting down on the floor to scribble with crayons before I had a child, what makes anyone think I’d enjoy it now?’ Continue reading

Thanks a bunch, Bill

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‘The time The Child got her hands on the Starr Report, and I had me a whole lot of ‘splainin’ to do’

The news as I write this is, deservedly, all about the late great David Bowie. But as much as I love ‘Modern Love’ and get a big kick out of la Bowie’s turn as a sexy vampire in ‘The Hunger’, I don’t, alas, have any amusing David-Bowie-related stories. So I’m gonna go with the one about Bill Clinton.

See, Bill Clinton, AKA Hillary’s Husband, was in the news recently too. It seems some transcripts were just released of phone chats between him and his Best Brit Bud Tony Blair. And the Times thought this was pretty juicy. (Okay, I have to ask: If you were president, would you tape your telephone conversations? Holy Tricky Dick, I honestly do not understand this.) Continue reading

It’s a wrap

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‘Yet another Christmas has come — and gone.’

When you were a kid, did you have an Advent Calendar? If you did, you got it around the first of December, hung it somewhere handy, like on the fridge, then every day you opened this little numbered door to reveal a gift or an animal or an ornament. Whatever was behind that little door didn’t really matter. It was just fun to do, and added a sort of ‘countdown drama’ to your already-overexcited anticipation of Christmas. (BTW, I just googled ‘Advent Calendar’ and guess what? It was invented by Lutherans.)

[I remember that The Child had a particularly clever Advent Calendar (a gift, natch) made of felt with little toys and ornaments that stuck to it with velcro. It’s buried somewhere in a bag full of (now underutilized) ornaments, ready to be unearthed and pressed back into action at some future (extremely hypothetical at this point) grandchild-populated date.]

But even if you weren’t a Little Lutheran armed with an Advent Calendar, waiting for Christmas was a pretty exciting time. We Henrys got so jazzed that we called December 23rd ‘Christmas Eve Eve’ and sometimes even December 22nd was dubbed ‘Christmas Eve Eve Eve’. But that’s nothing compared to one of my Facebook friends who posted on June 25 that it was ‘just six months until Christmas’. Now that’s a person who’s really got her Christmas Countdown down. Continue reading

Who’s yer Santa?

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‘What’s more fun than believing in Santa? Hanging around with a little kid who believes in Santa’

Can you remember when you believed in Santa? I certainly can. We’d be at my Swedish Gramma Peterson’s on Christmas Eve, and we’d hear stomping around upstairs (‘Santa’s sleigh just landed on the roof!’), then here he’d come, ho-ho-hoing his way down the stairs in all his red-suited glory with a big ole pillowcase of presents slung over his shoulder.

It never occurred to me to ask why he carried a pillowcase, nor did I ask to go see the sleigh up on the roof. I never even wondered why one of my uncles was always missing when Santa was in the room. I guess I just wanted to believe in Santa.

Which uncle is missing from this picture? Gramma P, who yes, believed in Santa, eagerly awaits his Big Entrance

Which uncle is missing from this picture? That’s Gramma P, who I like to think still believed in Santa, eagerly awaiting his Big Entrance

Continue reading

(N)o Tannenbaum

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‘I love The Tree. As long as somebody else decorates it.’

One of my earliest memories is of checking out the Christmas trees in the front windows of the houses in the small towns we’d pass through on our way to Gramma’s house in Northern Illinois. The radio would be playing Christmas music (‘Little Drummer Boy’ didn’t exist back then, thank god) and Dad would be driving. Usually I’d be the only one awake. Except for Dad, of course, who’d be smoking and sort of shaking his head from time to time to stay alert. Heady times.

I’d gaze at those trees through those windows and imagine the families gathered around them, the kids rattling the presents and trying to guess what was in there. Which I would do myself once we got to Gramma’s house. (You can see me, and my Oldest Younger Brother Scott, in the picture at the top of this post getting caught red-handed doing just that.)

My Aunt Marilyn, who would be home from college and in charge of Gramma and Grampa’s tree, loved decorating. She’d even decorate herself with Santa earrings and reindeer sweaters and such. She’d pick out the biggest tree she could find and go decorating crazy. I remember these lights that looked like candles. Special ornaments with stories attached. And tons of tinsel, which we called ‘icicles’. One year the tree was so big it had to be lopped off at the top to fit into the living room. She told us that tree went on up through the ceiling. And we believed her.

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‘Gracias’, Paris

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‘The Child and The Dude at loose in the City of Light’

I have some pretty nice memories of Paris I’ve been saving up. And I’m thinking this week is perfect for sharing, even though it’s fall, and not a rainy spring like when this story took place.

It was about 15 years ago. The Child was nine at the time, and a school break was coming up. The previous year I’d been to Paris for ten fabulous all-expense-paid days, shooting a batch of skincare commercials. (You can read about that, plus some other pretty memorable and/or exotic location-based adventures in ‘Around the World in 80 Shoots’.)

Did I have a good time on the aforesaid trip? Well. Let me just say that I was itching to get back there, so I was pitching Paris big-time as a Family Vacation.

Dude: ‘Paris? But I’ve been to Paris.’

Me: ‘Really? Just when did you go to Paris?’

Dude: ‘Oh, you know. When I was on that backpacking trip in college.’

Me: ‘Oh? And how much time did you spend in Paris?’

Dude: ‘A day, I think.’

We went to Paris. Continue reading

The Smarts against the Dumbs

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‘Show me a kid who grows up playing games, and I’ll show you a grownup who knows how to play games.’

If you have the good fortune to have access to the New York Times on Sunday (forgive the local journalistic boosterism), then you may already be familiar with a feature called ‘Sunday Routine’. New Yorkers of all stripes, including Jim Grant (better known as Lee Child), are asked about their, um, Sunday routines. Heady stuff.

Most of the New Yorkers profiled here, interestingly enough, do much the same as me and everyone else on a Sunday: read the paper, and drink coffee. (‘Lee Child’ drinks even more coffee on Sunday than I do, and that’s saying something.)

Well. I was giving this week’s piece (about some landscape designer or whatever) a perfunctory skim when I noticed her saying that her son wakes her every Sunday with a demand to play ‘Sorry!’. I felt an immediate connection with Whatshername, even though she’s decades younger and lives in a row house in Queens. And it was all about that demand to play a game.

When I was a kid — and even when The Child was actually a child — games were a big deal. I don’t, alas, have photographic evidence, but I swear on a stack of Scrabble dictionaries that we did in fact play hours and hours of Sorry! Also Clue (Miss Purple in the library with a candlestick, anyone?) and Monopoly. (I liked to ‘be’ the iron, for some strange reason.) Board games were big. Very big. And, of course, there was Scrabble. But before I get into Scrabble, let’s talk about cards. Continue reading

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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‘There is nothing scarier than a teenage girl’

A spirit once haunted my house. And it wasn’t just at Halloween. An alien presence took possession of The Child when she was, oh, 14 or so, and stuck around for about three years. Three very long, very frightening years.

Before she was possessed by this alien force — let’s call it the Spirit of Teen Girlhood — The Child was a normal, happy little sprite. An inventive sort who insisted, for unexplained reasons of her own, on dressing as objects for Halloween. As the years went by, she was, among other things, a Number Two Pencil, a Bloomingdale’s Bag, and a Pre-War Building. (Check her out as a Strawberry in ‘Happy Ho-made Halloween’.) Here are a couple more:

The Child as a candle, complete with flame

The Child as a candle, complete with flame. And flame-colored socks

Have a Child stand in a hole in a cardboard box, drape newspaper-stuffed leggings over the front, staple on a squirrel, and you've got a Park Bench

Cut a Child-sized hole in a cardboard box, drape newspaper-stuffed leggings over the front, staple on a squirrel, and you’ve got a Park Bench

Notice that in both of these shots she is smiling. While, in the picture at the top of this post, she is making that ‘okay okay, I’ll let you take a picture if you hurry up about it and get the heck out of here’ face. (Did you notice her eyes? I swear that’s not red-eye; that’s the Spirit peeking out.) Continue reading

In an alternate universe, I would have been a redhead

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‘What if Mom had married the Insurance Salesman?’

When we kids were bored and it was too rainy or too cold to throw us outside, our Mom would let us rummage through this big cardboard box of snapshots that she kept in the attic. Most of them were shots of family members. And all of them, in those days, were in black and white. Take this example, picturing my brothers Scott and Roger modeling (probably) Easter outfits, made by my Mom herself:

Incredibly cute, though typical, snapshot to be found in the big cardboard box

A typical, yet incredibly cute, snapshot to be found in the big cardboard box

We would pick through the pictures, admiring ourselves as Cute Little Tots, taking turns guessing the identities of the adults, and smirking at how funny everybody looked in the Olden Days.

No mistaking this relative: Aunt Net (short for Annette). Though we kids thought she was named after her hairnet

It was easy to spot Aunt Net (short for Annette, though we kids thought she was named after her hairnet)

One rainy boring day we were sifting away through the box and happened across a picture of an Adult We Didn’t Know. Who’s this? We asked our Mom. ‘Oh, that’s Jim. He’s a man I used to go out with.’ (‘Go out with? Like, as in on a date?’) We were shocked into horrified silence. Continue reading