mom

To pick. Or not to pick.

Standard

‘A story about a lady out standing in her (strawberry) field. Oh, and a dog named Snoball.’

It’s getting to be That Season. When signs like these are sprouting along the highways and byways: ‘Pick Ur Own Strawberries’. ‘Pick Ur Own Raspberries’. Even ‘Pick Ur Own Rhubarb’. Later on this summer you’ll be seeing ‘Pick Ur Own Corn’. (Which I do love in its already-picked state; see my ‘To Hell with Kale’ for the Best Corn-Cooking Method on The Planet Earth). And come Fall, there will be, you can count on it, ‘Pick Ur Own Pumpkin’ signs.

Nah. I'd actually rather U did the picking. And I did the eating

To be perfectly honest, I’d much rather U did the picking. And just handed me a nice box of berries

In case you miss the ubiquitous highway signs (sometimes, for grammatical variety, spelled ‘U-Pick’, as above) there are data bases for locating Pick-Ur-Own places in your area. I ‘picked’ (hah) this highlighted one, because it’s Southern Illinois berry-picking we’re going to be talking about.

By the way, I’ve also seen ‘Cut Ur Own Christmas Tree’ (see example below). One can only wonder when we’ll see invitations to ‘Chop Ur Own Wood’? ‘Slaughter Ur Own Beef’? ‘Split Ur Own Atom’? Continue reading

What’s in a name?

Standard

‘The story of a girl (almost) named Zeus’

Our Memorial Day tradition is to have our two super-adorable grand-nieces (yup, grand-nieces), Miss Just-Two and her older sister Miss Almost-Five, come down from the Boston area to help us celebrate the first official weekend of summer. Oh, okay. Their parents get to come too.

Last night we were polishing off our umpteenth bottle of wine (with the parents, not the adorable grand-nieces) and got to talking about how kids get their names. I guess things have changed a bit since we named The Child, because these parents confessed that Miss Almost-Five went four days without a name. Even more startling (to us, anyway) was the fact that Miss Just-Two went nameless for four whole months. During this time, she was known to all and sundry as Baby Girl. Or, for officialdom, as Baby Girl Last Name.

The Dad (The Dude’s older brother’s son) said he finally had to give in and name Baby Girl because, without a name, she could not get a social security number, and without a SSN, she sort of, well, didn’t exist. So, name her, they did. At least they didn’t let her name herself, which was Picabo Street’s parents’ genius idea. (Poor Picabo didn’t have a name till she was three years old.) Continue reading

Yachts: many many boats

Standard

‘A few salty sallies from the pages of New York Magazine.’

Last week’s post was sort of a Reader’s Digest of amusing Metropolitan Diary entries written by, um, me. Since you Readers seemed to get a kick out of it, I thought I’d regale you this week with a few examples of stuff of mine that got into New York Magazine. (If I ever get anything into the New Yorker, like my pal Ken, you’ll never hear from me again.)

Remember when I told you that Ad Folks are the funniest people ever? This famous New Yorker Cartoonist used to work at Ogilvy. And I actually KNOW him!

Remember when I told you that Ad Folks are the funniest people ever? This famous New Yorker Cartoonist used to work at Ogilvy. And I actually know him. Fun fact: he also wears blue glasses (!)

To be honest, I’m really doing this stuff-from-New-York-Magazine thing because I played hooky away from my computer all weekend. I was on a birdwatching trip (honest) to Cape May, New Jersey, and it was kind of hard to think about my blog while I was trying to concentrate on warbler wing bars. (I promise to share wacky birding stories soon; stay tuned for my views on how “birders” are practically sexually indistinguishable — and much much more!) Continue reading

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

Standard

‘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(!)

Standard

‘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

Pi are round

Standard

‘And other hilarious tales of math and memory’

Me, I’ve never been such a great shakes at memorizing stuff. I mean, I can rattle off a bit of verse. (My go-to poem: ‘Listen my children and you shall hear…of the midnight ride of Paul Revere’. Impressed?) And I am of the generation that was pressed to learn (by heart) the preamble to the Constitution (a practice I highly recommend to any and all presidential candidates). But. Memorizing pi? I’m not so sure I even knew what ‘pi’ meant when I was a kid.

Pi comes to mind because yesterday was March 14. Which is, in some circles, known as Pi Day. That’s because ‘pi’, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter (yes, I had to look that up), is commonly given as 3.14. And March 14 is commonly given as 3.14. Get it?

Anyway. Pi Day is sort of a Big Deal. And not just among the Pocket-Protector Set. Pi Day got amazing coverage, not only in The New Yorker, but on Facebook. Yesterday, in fact, it seemed that posts about Pi Day outnumbered those about Donald or Bernie or Hillary. (Um, well maybe I’m just mathematically wishfully thinking here.)

A sample of side-splitting Facebook Pi Humor from yesterday, Pi Day, 3.14

Sample of side-splitting Facebook Pi Humor from yesterday, Pi Day, 3.14

The other thing about ‘pi’, the thing that gets everyone all atingle — well, maybe not everyone — is that pi is infinite. Again, according to my handy online source, mathisfun.com (hmmm, if you have to say something is fun, then is it?), pi is equal to 3.14159265358979323846. And that’s just for starters. See, the digits go on forever, and without repeating. This is like catnip to Math Nerds. Every year on 3.14, they get all excited and try to outdo each other reciting pi to as many places as they can. Seriously. Contests are held. Records are broken. Egos are threatened! Continue reading

It’s a wrap

Standard

‘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

The fruitcake gene

Standard

‘You either have it, or you don’t’

Have you ever heard someone say ‘Fruitcake isn’t my favorite, but that sure looks tasty’? Or ‘A slice of fruitcake might make a nice change from pie’? No. It’s usually more like ‘Fruitcake! Blechhh. I hate fruitcake’.

Fruitcake is so frowned-upon that there are even jokes about it. You’ve heard the one about there really only being one fruitcake in existence? That it just keeps getting re-gifted? And there is the ‘fruitcake’ pictured at the top of this post. It will ‘never ever get stale’. Basically because you blow it up like a whoopee cushion. And then you don’t eat it.

The 'Fruitcake they'll actually want to get', seen as served. At least you won't have to wash the plate

‘Serving suggestion’ for the ‘fruitcake that never gets stale’. At least you never have to wash the plate

But I have a confession to make. Continue reading

Leftovers

Standard

‘A few stories that got pushed to the back of the fridge’

I know, I know. It’s Christmas Season. And has been since around Halloween, it seems. And while I like the tinsel and the lights and the music (well, except for ‘Little Drummer Boy’) and, most of all, the sensationally savory scent of evergreen, I’m just not quite ready to let go of Thanksgiving.

For one thing, I have a big ole pot of turkey soup to ladle out. But that’s it for leftovers of the edible kind. Absolutely nothing else is left: not the stuffing, not the mashed potatoes, not the non-powdered-sugar gravy, not the cranberry sauce. And especially not the pies. Which were basically gone by breakfast on Black Friday. (Incidentally, I like to think it’s called ‘Black’ Friday because everyone is sad because the pies are gone.)

Pies, left to right: cranberry-apple, apple, and pumpkin, pre-feast, in the Pie Keeper, AKA laundry room.

Pies, while they still existed. Left to right: apple, cranberry-apple, and pumpkin. In the Pie Keeper, AKA the laundry room

And for another thing, Continue reading

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Standard

‘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