Instead of saying hello when I walk in the door, Rachel likes to greet me with statements like, “I’m pretty sure there’s asbestos in our attic,” or “It smells like gas in here.” (Okay, she’s never actually said that she’s sure there’s asbestos in the attic, but rest assured, now that I’ve written that, she’ll be thinking, “Asbestos … in the attic … Alert. ALERT!”) It’s a charming quirk, her refusal to embrace conventional forms of salutation, but I’ve learned to love it.

So I should not have been surprised when, one day last week, as I walked in the door, she announced to me, “Rowan wants to buy a Happy Meal.”

She said this to me with the gravity with which other parents might have said, “Rowan wants a tattoo.”

Rachel and I have read Fast Food Nation. We’re committed to not eating at the Golden Arches or any of its cousins. We make pizza from scratch, sneak beet greens from the garden into meatballs made from local, organically raised cows. We’re turning the front yard into an earnest little organic vegetable garden.

And yet, our kids are no stranger to McDonald’s. They’ve been to the Golden Arches for birthday parties. Their grandfather has taken them on occasion. (On Passover, no less. Twice.) Their babysitter takes them there frequently to play in the PlayPlace. And, frankly, I’ve been known to end up there myself — on a dark, frigid Sunday afternoon in the middle of winter in a sleepy northern Ontario town, sometimes it is necessary to take children to a free, indoor park to blow off steam for couple of hours. They bounce around on the slides while I write or read a magazine. And we all leave happy, if somewhat sullied.

What our kids are mostly strangers to is the actual food at McDonald’s. When they go with their babysitter, they bring their own lunches, and when I take them, we don’t eat or I assuage my guilt by bringing our own bottles of water and snacks. Occasionally, I will acquiesce to letting them get a muffin or some milk, but even that makes me itchy. The not eating thing was made easier by the fact that, until very recently, Rowan didn’t like chicken fingers or french fries.

But then he saw the movie How to Train Your Dragon, and then he put two and two together and obliged the marketing powers that be by realizing that the toy from the movie was in that meal from McDonald’s! And suddenly, his desire for a Happy Meal burned with the intensity of a thousand splendid suns.

Which left me and Rachel in a moral quandary. We finally decided that he could have his Happy Meal — provided he used his own money to buy it. I’m not sure that Rowan’s ancestors, upon fleeing ancient Egypt all those millennia ago, imagined that one day a five-year-old would use his afikoman money to purchase a very traif fast-food meal.

And yet, there are many things about my life but I’m sure my ancestors did not imagine, either.

“Do you even like the food in a Happy Meal?” I asked him. “Will you even eat it?”

“Oh, yes!” he said, and then launched into a soliloquy of such praise for the food that I briefly considered getting him an agent: “I love it! I love the chicken fingers and I love the french fries and I love the ketchup that you dip the chicken fingers and the french fries in and I love the drink and I love the apple slices and I will get the apple slices so that you’re not worried that I’m not eating healthy food and I will eat it all. Mom.”

“And you know that it’s only a very sometimes food?”

“Yes, Mom,” he said. “I know.”

And so he (and his brother) went to McDonald’s with their babysitter and their own money and bought — and ate — two Happy Meals and got two plastic dragons with removable wings and eyes that light up when you press a button.

And they were happy.

And I will deal.

But I’m never going to learn to love it.

… can be heard today — talking about (what else?) And Baby Makes More — on CFUV 101.9 FM. That is, they can be heard on the radio for those of you lucky enough to actually be in Victoria, BC, today, where I’m guessing that the illusion that it’s still fall is being perpetuated. Tune in between 1 and 2 PM Pacific time. For those of you elsewhere, you can listen in online at www.cfuv.uvic.ca.

It’s a good thing “Women on Air” didn’t try to interview me last week, because the interview would have been punctuated by coughing fits and extended nose-blowing sessions. So sexy. Yes, hot on the heels of H1N1, the dreaded, month-long sinus infection with the bonus pack of hacking cough has returned. I’d like to think that the germs have rendered my voice appropriately Kathleen Turner-esque, but really I sound like Harvey Fierstein just inhaled some helium.

Speaking of Harvey, if I hadn’t already given away my right thumb to the past year, I would give it away now to go see him play Tevye in the production of Fiddler on the Roof currently touring North America but — surprisingly — not stopping in Thunder Bay. What, David Mirvish, the 30-odd Jews up here weren’t a big enough draw? I guess I can’t blame you when the local Santa-meter is already pushing 11. Exhibit A.: my son’s PUBLIC SCHOOL senior kindergarten curriculum, which seems to have emerged intact from the 1950s. It’s all decorated with pictures of Santa and Christmas trees and reindeer and the like, and filled with chirpy instructions to “Decorate your tree and bring it to school this week!” “Write a letter to Santa!” “Practice your holiday songs and teach them to your family!” “Count the days until Christmas!” “Put out milk and cookies for Santa and a carrot for his reindeer!” (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. I did add in those exclamation marks.)

Discussion with the school is ensuing. Wish us luck in convincing the powers that be that it’s time to break with, as Tevye would say, “Tradition! Tradition!” in favour of some December activities that feel just a wee bit more, oh, multicultural. Inclusive. You know — something that makes me feel less like I’m living in a ghetto.

And this past Saturday morning was bowling.

Every so often, on a whim, you do something you don’t usually do and you realize that there exists an entire world of people who live to do that thing, who have created entire communities and languages and art forms and T-shirts devoted to that thing. For me, bowling is one of those things. Naïvely, I expected Mario’s Bowl to be fairly quiet on a Saturday morning in Thunder Bay. As we pulled into the only vacant space in the parking lot, I realized I would have to rethink my assumptions.

We managed to snag the only available five-pin lane left in the entire, buzzing, place. Children’s bowling leagues were practicing in the first twenty-odd lanes, while adult leagues took up the bulk of the ten-pin alleys. We came with a school friend of Rowan’s, and his little sister, who is the same age as Isaac, and their mom. The two older boys played (and, let me tell you, little is sweeter than a four-year-old boy in bowling shoes) while the toddlers ate Goldfish crackers and stuck their hands up the gumball machine chutes and then, in Isaac’s case, discovered the bowling balls.

While Rachel bowled with Rowan (who was, I must say, a model of turn taking and cooperation), I was in charge of ensuring that Isaac harmed no one — himself included — by, say, lobbing a five-pin bowling ball into the path of an innocent junior bowler, or dropping a ball on someone’s foot. In essence, we formed a miniature assembly line: he picked up a ball, and I immediately relieved him of it. Repeat a million times.

In an effort to distract him for at least a little while, I took him on a forced march throughout the rest of the bowlerama, placating him with said gumball machines and the exploration of the bowling ball lockers. (Again, who knew? Who knew that dozens and dozens and dozens of dedicated bowlers would need lockers to store their balls and shoes and gloves and the like? Of course, now it all seems obvious in retrospect.)

We sat for a while at a table above the lanes with two women and a boy who looked to be around ten years old. I guess that they were grandmother, mother, and son, watching what I guessed were grandfather and father roll a series of strikes and spares oh so casually down their lane in wide, graceful arcs. Isaac climbed into a chair and smiled at the women, who obliged him by cooing. “Are you a busy boy?” asked the mother. “Are you? Yes?”

“Yeah,” said Isaac, laughing, as I rolled my eyes and nodded in agreement.

The mother laughed too, and pointed at her son. “Oh! He was all the time, back, forth, back, forth,” she said in accented English, her index finger swinging left, then right, then left again to illustrate. “I never sit down. Oh! When he was year, year and a half” — and here she drew an imaginary knife across her neck — “I want to cut off my head.”

I love it when people say things like that.

But I’m glad that I didn’t cut off my head, because then I wouldn’t have seen a tiny, tiny boy in grey sweatpants gets to pick up his own bowling ball — finally! — toddle up to the foul line (under Rachel’s careful tutelage), gently set the ball down, and push it with all his might towards the pins. It rolled and rolled and rolled and rolled toward its destination. For all I know, it’s rolling still.

Check out my article, “Small-Town Jew Blues,” at InterfaithFamily.com, on being a queer mom raising kids who are Jewish in Thunder Bay: “For my sons, having two mothers is natural, omnipresent, what they’ve always known. It’s being Jewish that requires more work.”

Note: I did not write — nor can I vouch for the accuracy of — the caption. Sleeping Giant versus strip malls: you decide.

You take your chances at the Safeway checkout in Thunder Bay. Today, I got Donna Mae and a whole lotta conversation.

“So,” she said, swiping through my six litres of yogurt, “I was reading this book last night? On the menopause? And how you have to eat for it?”

“Uh huh.” I smile and nod.

“It’s like you can’t eat anything!” she continues. “I’m reading this and thinking, ‘What can you eat? Nothing!’ You want your milk in a bag?”

“Oh, no thanks,” I say.

“And calcium. Calcium is very important. I mean, I drink a big glass of milk every day, but some of the food you eat has cheese in it and that, too.”

Nod and smile.

“You’re supposed to take a multivitamin every day,” she tells me. “ But I don’t do that. I just figure you should get your vitamins from what you eat, right? If you eat good?”

“Uh huh.” Nod and smile. Four years after moving to this town, I am no longer surprised by the friendliness of the cashiers, their propensity to comment on the food you buy. “Leeks?” the woman behind the checkout counter will say to me. “What do you use them in, anyway? I’ve never tried them.” Or, “That’s a lot of apples! You making pie?” One time, a cashier told the woman in front of me, who was reading People in line, “Excuse me, Miss, this isn’t a library.” I looked up, horrified and slightly thrilled, at this unprecedented display of unfriendliness, and both women burst into laughter. Turns out they were friends.

“And nuts!” says Donna Mae, shoving a case of soda water back underneath my cart. “You’re supposed to eat a lot of nuts. But” — and here she pauses to take my credit card — “how much is a lot of nuts? A handful? And nuts have a lot of fat in them. So, I don’t know. You know?”

I love a lot of things about living here. And there are a lot of things I don’t miss (amidst the lot of things I really miss) about Toronto. But I’m still not quite resigned to the Thunder Bay supermarket checkout confessional. I just want to buy my yogurt and my milk and my leeks and my apples and get the hell out of there with a little Toronto surliness to let me know I’m still alive. Is that so wrong?