I feel as though I’m neglecting this blog this week — probably the net result of my jaunt to LA (more on that anon, but the short version here is that it was fantastic, and not just because I made it to the reading(!), which was populated by a group of uniformly excellent writers). Yes, Los Angeles, and also the necessity of Writing All the Other Things. Including but not limited to my third draft, which has been quietly humming along. I have finished a really intense readthrough and am now attempting beginning the process of actually revising. As Yoda says, there is no try, there is only writing with a timer sitting next to you until it beeps. Or until your eyes bleed, whichever comes first.

Of course, this kind of work requires its own amount of healthy procrastination. Today, that involved clearing off the top of my wardrobe. Here is a photograph of all the long, pointy objects I found there, objects I have confiscated from small boys over the past few years and secreted way up high. They’re all back up there now — I’m no fool. Well, unless you count that part about trying to write writing a novel.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

If you read these pages regularly, you are no doubt aware that

1. Rowan is highly obsessed with Pokémon, and that
2. I am highly obsessed with organization. And, further, that
3. I dislike playing Pokémon, particularly when I have to play against a winner-takes-all eight-year-old who quite literally stacks the decks against me. “Here,” he’ll say, tossing me some wimpy little deck full of crappy cards like Solosis or Sewaddle or Tynemo, “these are your cards.” Meanwhile, his deck is full of Lugia EXes and White Kyurams and Zekroms. And then he proceeds to annihilate me, all the while maintaining some kind of fantasy that he is a gifted player and not just a hustler. (My brother-in-law has a theory that all games with prepubescent boys are simply versions of, “Hey! Do you want to play ‘Victor’? I’ll be the Victor!”) But I digress.

Although on the surface Rowan’s obsession and my obsession may appear to have little to do with each other, in reality, there’s lots of room for overlap. There are, I believe, nine distinct types of Pokémon (off the top of my head: water, air, grass, psychic, darkness, dragon, metal, fighting, electric, and… something else — and look at me, devoting precious brain cells to Pokémon types!), plus assorted energy cards for each type, and so-called “trainer” cards to boot. All of which for years have been jumbled into untidy heaps around the house and Rowan’s room. At best, under duress, he will pile all of the cards into willy-nilly into a cardboard box in his room, which he later dumps unceremoniously onto his floor, scrabbling through a thousand-plus cards to find the ones he wants to create his power decks. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a constant point of contention between me and him — not simply the mess, which is bad enough, but the potential, the potential, the thwarted potential to sort all those cards into their various types, to place each type into its own separate container for easy access, to create, in short, a system — ideally, one that involves the use of a label-maker. I don’t like the game, but my fingers have itched for so long now to organize those cards. “Do you think you’d like to sort out those cards?” I have asked him at various points, and he shrugs his shoulders and says, “Maybe later.” “How about now?” I’ll say, and he will refuse to answer. But on Saturday, for some reason, we hit the sweet spot. He wanted to make a new deck, and I said I would help. And thus began the great Pokémon card organizational extravaganza. Isaac got in on the action too, and he and I sat on Rowan’s bedroom floor, colour-coding cards into various piles while Rowan handpicked the ones he wanted to make an ever-more-powerful deck. It took the better part of an hour, with me sneaking back into the room at various points during the day to finesse the system, but we got it done. There are labels. It’s been the better part of a week now, and it seems to be holding — although I won’t hold my breath.

The best part of it all was listening to my older boy exclaim, over and over, “Mom! I really like this! It makes it so much easier to find the cards I want!” Words straight to my colour-coded little heart. He’s Pokémon geek. I’m an organizational geek. And maybe, just maybe, we’ve found some kind of middle ground.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Rowan is home sick today. Just before midnight last night, our bedroom door opened and he appeared, backlit by the light in the hallway, and then … well, you don’t need to know the details except for thank God hardwood floors and not carpet. I love kid logic: I think I need to barf. I’ll go see my moms.

Today, he’s home, bopping about the house in his pajamas and seemingly perfectly fine, if slightly low-energy. He’s kept down food, he has good colour, he’s practicing his tae kwon do patterns and creating bigger and better Pokémon decks and revelling in the pile of books we picked up from the library and the extra iPod time. He’s totally happy — a quiet day at home, both parents to himself with , dare I say it, no sibling to dilute the attention.

It’s so rare to have just one child around the house with both of us. And despite the extra laundry and the nagging worry that we haven’t seen the last of this gastro bug (why, why, why did I decide it was a good idea to finish off his uneaten oatmeal yesterday?), I do like it. One minimally ill kid is so cozy, so happy, so easy. He wanders into my office and hugs me, offers me trivia tidbits. We lie down on opposite ends of the couch with our reading material and his bare foot nudges my thigh. I sent a couple of e-mails, write a couple of paragraphs, fold a couple of sheets, ruffle his hair, and revel in this sweet, quiet, stolen day.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

We’re eating out of the pantry these days — trying to work our way through what we already have in the house before finally, grudgingly, giving and going grocery shopping. Partly, we’re doing it to try to make a dent in our ghastly grocery bills. Partly, we’re doing it because nobody in this house likes going grocery shopping and so the longer we can wait between trips, the better. Partly, we’re doing it for the perverse thrill of seeing the back of the fridge. Who knew?

But mostly, we’re doing it because we are awash in food, because our freezers and our cupboards and our refrigerator floweth over, bursting at the seams with our plenty. We have so much food that we don’t eat, and so we’re trying to eat it rather than ignoring it and going for the obvious, for the fresh pack of chicken and the baby carrots and English cucumbers.

Seriously, we’re pretty good for food. We bought (with apologies to the vegetarians) an eighth of a cow in September. I let my friend Karen talk me into buying not one but two cases of organic Spartan apples in December (okay, it’s my own fault), and now a half-dozen crisps lie in wait downstairs in the freezer while I ponder whether the remaining dozen or so in the fridge will last or if I should make them into yet another batch of sauce.

(Decision: applesauce.)

(I love the Thunder Bay economy: Stephanie orders organic peaches and teaches me how to can; I show up with piecrust and we each end up with stuff for the pantry. Karen organizes the organic apple order and I drop off a communal cheque from her and me and Derek to the organic apple order people, whose house I can tell from the others on the street because of the hand-lettered “no pesticides” sign on the lawn. Karen pays me back from her till at her stand at the farmer’s market on Saturday, and Derek gets me with a bunch of fives in an ATM envelope at Pokémon club on Saturday, where we all take turns keeping track of each other’s kids. And then Karen and I spend an afternoon making apple crisps while our children run around us like maniacs (we get so obsessed that we lose track of time and end up ordering pizza in for dinner for everyone, which is kind of the opposite of what we wanted), while Stephanie texts me to show off her husband, Carlo’s, recent loaves of bread — he’s become obsessed with breadmaking and I sweet-talk him about it at every opportunity because, well, fresh bread made by someone who’s obsessed . I need to take an apple crisp over there.)

We’ve still got beets from the garden in the fridge, despite my first pickling efforts and having made a couple of rounds of my friend Nat’s infamous beet hummus (also in the freezer). I think we’ve very nearly got through all the frozen ends of bread in the freezer — but we still have flour, and yeast, and a bread maker (and two loaves of challah, which I make in batches of three) and so there’s no point in buying more: I’ll just whip up a loaf with what we already have.

Tonight’s dinner will be steak and quinoa salad: why is it that we have a gallon-jar full of quinoa and yet I never remember it? Toss it with a can of corn, one of chick peas, the rest of the marinated artichoke hearts, a jar of roasted red peppers and the last of the first of the two containers of feta. I get a wee thrill, a perverse sense of accomplishment, every time I throw a jar into the recycling, run a spatula around the inside of another container. The kids could use muffins in their lunches, so I’ll unearth a couple of the dozen or so containers of pumpkin from October’s jack-o’-lanterns and experiment with a batch of pumpkin muffins — if they’re hungry enough, they’ll eat them, right? Too bad we just ran out of chocolate chips, but maybe some candied pecans, because we have pecans and sugar … or I could chop up the last of the Chanukah gelt that the kids forgot about and throw that in.

We have three jars of olive oil, because we keep going to the store and buying more, thinking, Don’t we always need olive oil? No, apparently not.

When we ran out of our regular tea, we went through all the fancy (caffeinated — we’re not that committed) teas in the cupboard that we’ve received as gifts over the years and have forgotten about. And they were good. We have chicken stock, and lentils, and pounds of carrots, and frozen pesto, and diced tomatoes, and brown rice vermicelli, pasta fagiole in lunch-size containers, canned peaches, half a cauliflower (oh, and on Friday night I danced such a parental dance around getting Rowan to try just one bite because I think you’ll like it but it’s really up to you because I don’t care that much of roasted cauliflower and he finally did and then ate a small mountain of it and I died happy), some broccoli that will perk up just fine once I stick it in water. We can make popcorn. We have peanut butter and couscous (the kids hate couscous, they tell us, but we’ll keep trying, like with the cauliflower) and 11 different kinds of vinegar and beans, beans, so many beans.

We have garlic.

We are bursting.

It doesn’t feel like restraint. It feels exhilarating, like every mealtime is a game of (no pun intended) chicken with the universe and the gods of plenty always side with us. Like some home ec exercise and we’re getting an A. Like we’re on some cooking show for earnest/foodie homemakers challenged with making a passable dinner out of an aubergine and some capers. And we are so totally on. We are potluck-ready: we’re bringing apple crisp and beet dip and we will feast and shun the store for as long as we can.

What’s in your pantry? How long could you go?

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

“Can I just sit here and watch you when you write?”

“No, honey. You can’t.”

“I’ll be quiet. I won’t say a word. I’ll just sit here.”

“No.”

“Can I turn out the lights? So I can sit here in the dark? While you write?”

“Isaac: no.”

“I’ll just sit on your lap, okay?”

“Isaac—”

“And I’ll use this pen…”

* * *

Every so often — less often, these days, now that my kids are school age — I meet someone who hears that I’m a writer and work from home and assumes that I somehow write around the children. Like I just squeeze in space between making yummy snacks and waging Pokémon battles.

Um, no.

There is writing about children. There is writing about parenting. But there is, for me, no writing with actual children present, unless you count dashed-off notes to be used for later, when I have room to breathe and think and dictate. There is no writing with naked five-year-old boys sitting Gollum-like on the floor next to my desk (in the dark). (Or in the light.) There is no writing that happens while I am asked eleventy thousand questions about my writing and have to protect my hoard of Pentel RSVP fine-point black ballpoint pens from those who would repurpose them for weapons.

“The next book you write, Mama, can it be a book for kids?” Rowan asks me about this regularly. And it’s a hard question to answer. I mean, on the one hand, I adore his optimism and his faith that there will be not only this book, but another and another, and that I can write in any damn genre I please. And, who knows? Maybe the muse will strike and I will find myself the proud author of a kidlit or young adult novel. But chances are slim. And, given my current pace, it’s unlikely that either of my children will actually be kids should I manage to pull off that one. Still, it feels a bit mean to say no, over and over, to try to make him understand that that’s simply not what I do. That I love my kids, and love kids’ books, but have no urge to write a book for them — even if it’s no big deal to simply lay out a few thousand words in the right order, right?

“Can I have copies of all your books?” Sure. If and when that novel is ever published, you can have a copy of it, and I will trust that you will skip right over those sex scenes to the parts where the gravely ill mom fights with her teenage daughter. Better you should read that book on life insurance that I ghostwrote, or that parenting book I managed to squeeze out before I had squeezed out any of my own children.

“Can you put our names in your books? Like at the front?” What he means by this is that he wants me to dedicate a book to him. This, I can do. Assuming there are future books, I would be more than happy to dedicate them to him. And his brother. In fact, given my druthers, I will probably dedicate my books to something namby-pamby like “my family” and be done with it, which may not be exactly what he has in mind. I think he wants to see his name in print, and not just a pseudonym.

“Are you writing about me? Are you telling a story about me?” Yes, I am. Often, I am. I hope that’s okay with you. I mean, of course I stick with the adage that I am writing about me every time I write about you, but you’re still there, still playing a role. And for that I thank you.

“Are you famous? Because I told my teacher that you’re a famous writer.” Oh, Rowan: I’m so sorry that I laughed out loud when you asked me this at dinner. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, or — even worse — sully your high hopes for my fame. I certainly didn’t mean to ridicule you, but, honey, no. I am not famous. Not even on the Internet.

(PS: That said, I may be slightly more famous on the Internet than I was on Sunday: check out my HuffPo debut mention here.)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I canned peaches with a friend last night. I’ve never canned anything before, aside from that brief foray into pickled beets a couple of weeks ago (and, frankly, I’m not entirely sure I got that one right, although I don’t have the heart yet to go check on my jars sitting there so hopeful in the cupboard). I’ve wanted to learn how to can for years and years, to line up the jars of summer and sweat in the cupboard. But the project has seemed so daunting for so long from the outside: all that sterilizing and boiling and popping out of air bubbles and processing and waiting and hoping for the seal and the threat all round of death.

So many things to get wrong, such huge repercussions.

But then Stephanie texted me like a gift to say she’d ordered peaches and did I want her to order me a box, too, and then I could come over and she could show me how. And I wrote back, YES! of course, and she mentioned that they would arrive in the next couple of weeks, these British Columbia Freestone peaches, and that once they arrived we would have to can them the very moment they were ripe. What followed was a comedy of errors in terms of scheduling: the traditional and the modern colliding as we tried desperately in the midst of Jewish holidays and soccer tryouts and wine club dinners and Symphony tickets and work schedules to find an evening that would work. Last night, we finally opened a bottle of wine and two boxes of peaches as tender as a baby’s bruise, and got to work.

“They won’t be pretty,” she said. “But they’ll taste good.”

So much is going on right now, all those beginnings and endings of chapters and pieces that I am sorting through in my life. It’s the kind of time that makes me crave a big project that can be accomplished over the course of an evening and a bottle of wine when two people stand and score and scald and cut fruit and place it gently, cut side down, in hot, clean jars. Fill with syrup, knock out the air bubbles, screw on lids fingertip-tight and process, process, process in boiling water for 25 minutes. At each step me saying, “Just so long as nobody dies, I’m okay.” And her saying, “Nobody’s gonna die.”
She should know; she’s a doctor. For what that’s worth.

In between those steps, I made peach pies (also for the first time), rolling out dough and mixing cut fruit with lemon juice and flour, cinnamon and salt, stirring it together with my hands. I held them up, dripping with fruit and sugar, and asked Stephanie if she would forgive me if I licked my fingers — too much sweetness to rinse away. She, meanwhile, was boiling down the tiny bits of peach left over to make juice for her kids, and why not?

We chatted, mostly about the process at hand and how we grew up: what we’ve learned on our own, what our mothers taught us (for the record, while my mom loved to feed people, canning would never have interested her. She did, however, make several dozen apple crisps each fall, when the apples were at their peak, and froze them — a tradition I have continued and that my children adore.).  I asked her what it actually meant to be on call all weekend: does that mean you sit at home and wait for your beeper to go off? Are you at the hospital all day? What’s involved? What do you do? The things I don’t know about a doctor’s life. She asked how the writing was going, mused about the difference between being an avid reader and an absolutely reluctant writer. Did I like rereading what I had already written, she wanted to know. When enough time has passed, I said.

And when what I wrote was good in the first place.

And then we were done, the project completed well before midnight, beginning to end, nothing killed but the bottle.

So far.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I was thinking this morning about this time when I was nine or ten and I took a sheet of puffy stickers with googly eyes — remember those? — and I decided, on a whim, to stick all the stickers, the entire sheet’s worth, in random places in my parents’ bathroom: the underside of the toilet seat, next to the shower head, inside the medicine cabinet, the plant stand. Secret places, not readily visible. About a dozen stickers. I stuck them all on, and I didn’t say anything about them, and they didn’t say anything about them. And then, what I remember now as a couple of months later, I was in their bathroom and I remembered the stickers, and I said to my mom, “Hey, did you ever—” and she laughed quietly and said, “Daddy and I had so much fun finding those.”

Sometimes I think that’s my favourite childhood memory, everything good wrapped up in a single moment: the Day-Glo colors and 3-D textures, the secret whimsy, the intimacy and silliness of it all and the way they kept my secret. The way they never got mad at me for messing up their bathroom. The way they never removed those stickers; I had that plant stand for years, all through my university-apartment days, and every so often I would catch a glimpse of that ice cream cone with a cherry on top still stuck on it and it always made me smile.

I wonder what my kids’ memories will be. I wonder if they already have them.

(What’s your favourite, tiny, childhood memory? Why?)

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Eighty-six plastic bread bag ties, secreted away in our cutlery drawer, rather than being tossed  in the garbage the way God intended us to in first place.

Apparently we live in mortal fear of unclosed plastic bags. Or of ever being without a guitar pick.

Excuse me, I’ve got to go find the phone under the rubble; Hoarders is calling.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I just need to tell you this: We’ve been on a wee bit of a soup bender here at Casa Non Grata. And yes, I am aware that that phrase, “soup bender,” may well be considered an oxymoron by some of you. And by “some of you,” I mean those of you with jobs that require them to leave the house and houses that are situated in warm places. And actual lives, perhaps with children who do not wake up before 6 AM. For example.

But for me, hunkered down on the Canadian Shield in January, things are getting pretty wild around the stockpot. So far this month, I’ve whipped up a kitchen-sink version of sweet potato/red pepper purée (sure, throw in that carrot! Got some celery? Why not?), pasta fagioli (so far my favourite), orzo soup with caramelized onions and cheese (Rowan and his friend kept wandering into the kitchen and saying, as I caramelized the onions, “Ew! What smells so bad?” Heathens.), a white kidney bean purée with prosciutto (yay, traif!), and, just last night, a leek and cauliflower soup with (local) elk sausage (and some potato). Tomorrow: yellow split pea.

Souperiffic.

There is not some overarching metaphor for this: it’s simply about warmth and nourishment, the desire to create something tangible, use up what’s left, transform the raw and the leftover into the sublime. I’ve got a little routine going: each week, I boil up the bones of our Friday-night chicken (because we roast a chicken pretty much every Friday night, because we do, because that is the tradition, and certain people – and by “certain people” I mean, well, me. And my children — like things that way) and make stock, and from stock I make soup in double batches. And we eat some and we freeze some in lovingly labeled containers that I take out and eat for lunch later on in the week. And every so often I encounter someone who looks a little down or tired or in need of some nourishment and I yank out just such a container from the freezer and hand it over. And think, “Eat, eat.” Love in a Tupperware.

And then I go to bed at nine o’clock, full , and plumb tuckered out from all the excitement.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

“This is the worstest night ever,” said Rowan as I tucked him into bed on Friday night.

He had a point. We’d driven home from a potluck dinner in the rain, high winds whipping raindrops across the road. As we drove up the street, I halfway noted the Hydro truck parked across from the house. Really, it was difficult to miss, what with it being outlined in reflective tape and the message splayed across its back: “HIT THE BRAKES, NOT US.” But I was focused. Focused on getting two tired children to bed without the aid of their other mother, out of town at a conference; focused on the myriad of tiny details — shoes, snacks, teeth, blankie, pajamas, dishwasher — involved in achieving that goal. Focused on achieving said goal (get them to bed get them to bed to get them to bed get them to bed) while being a decent host to Elizabeth, our entirely accommodating houseguest, herself the mother of a small child and, thankfully, wise in the ways of small children’s bedtimes and general behaviours (a confession: I likely would not have extended the invitation to stay had she not been). Focused enough to be blinkered against the truck’s blinking lights, focused enough not to notice right away the note taped to our front door, focused enough to wonder why on earth my next-door neighbour was out in this weather, focused enough (get them to bed get them to bed to get them to bed get) to be momentarily confused by the fact that both he and the Hydro guy seemed to want to talk to me, about a tree, the tree, our tree, down in our backyard, the tree that had ripped out our power and telephone lines and something about live wires and… “We’re shutting you off in a few minutes. Then it might be safe to go inside.”

Oh.

We all trooped back to the car for a minute while I tried to regroup. The kids listened, wide eyed, as I told them to under no circumstances go into the backyard because they could get very badly hurt.

“Or even die?” asked Isaac.

“Or even die,” I said, and his lower lip just started to tremble.

“I could drop you somewhere else for the night,” I told Elizabeth, panics, apologetic for the inconvenience, for at that point being the last possible thing I was sure she needed — “a hotel, or a friend’ s. You could get a good night’s sleep, not have to deal with this.”

“No.” She looked at me like I was insane. “No no. I’m sticking with you guys.”

 I exhaled, got us indoors, got a flashlight, got some water into pitchers and candles in candlesticks and children, miraculously, into pajamas. Greg, our saintly next-door-neighbour, ran an extension cord over from his house and offered to hook up the fridge and freezer. The Hydro guy came to the front door to tell me to call an electrician (“I’m not supposed to do this,” he said, naming the name of someone good and available and preapproved) and then call them back when the line was securely fastened to the house. Elizabeth read Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing with Rowan by flashlight (he’d wandered into my room as I lay in the dark (of course in the dark) with an overstimulated Isaac and asked if he could read with us. “I just want… to be with… with people,” he said, softly, and she scooped him off to read in his bedroom, laughing at all the funny bits.)

The kids got to sleep — Rowan with a tea light twinkling on his bookshelf and the promise that I wouldn’t blow it out until he was “really, really okay.” The electrician came over and charged me approximately infinity dollars an hour to repair the lines (in my estimation, worth every penny as he worked from 7:30 until midnight outside in the howling wind), and then Hydro came by (at 8 the next morning, after I dozed on the couch all night assuming they’d show up any second and need to me to let them in) and charged approximately the same amount to hook up our power early the next morning. (It would have been free, they told me, if I wanted to wait until Monday, but the prospect of single parenting with two children on a chilly weekend while hosting a houseguest without electricity: well, what would you do? Exactly. Exactly my friend.) Elizabeth and I made tea via extension cord, and sat up until midnight wrapped in blankets, catching up on several years’ worth of experience (births, deaths, books, loves, houses).

The worstest night ever? “It’s been a wonderful night,” I told my six-year-old, naming off all the people looking out for us, helping us, fixing our house even as we spoke. I talked about his warm, dry bed; the candles twinkling in the darkness; our intact bodies; the food in our bellies and the love around us. And the fact that Elizabeth had a cell phone. “It’s been a great adventure, and a great, great night.”

And, you know, sure: I was talking parent-speak, making the scary manageable for a scared kid. But really, I meant every word. 

Bookmark It

Hide Sites