So I went to the Obstetrician's office on Thursday for a routine visit. My plan was to go there, come home, go register my car, get my new license at the DMV, go to work, and come home. The only problem was, nothing about that visit was going right. I dropped the cup of urine for the sample, and then found out my blood pressure soared from a normal 120/80 to 140/104 in not even a week. I could hear the doctor talking to the nurses in the hall, and suddenly everything seemed sort of frantic. I know about pre-eclampsia and what it is and can do, but I didn't think they'd make that determination on the face of one bad reading.
The upshot of it is that my doctor told me I wasn't going to work that day (and probably not again for the semester) and that I was to go immediately to the hospital for "evaluation." She gave me some papers in an envelope which read "Evaluate for PIH"...then some names of tests, then "bed rest." That's when I started to get scared, because I know some women who have been on hospital bed rest--and I'm not due for a month! Still, I was hoping they'd do the tests and released me.
When I got there they sent me right up to the birthing center, put me in a gown and in a hospital bed, hooked me up to monitors, took blood, and I didn't even get to call Scott until I'd been there an hour. A nurse told me that my doctor probably hadn't mentioned that I might be there for 24 hours. Fortunately, the fetal stress test, the blood tests, the urine tests, and every other test turned out fine, and I did get to see the baby's face on an ultrasound (very cute, chubby face) and I discovered that our so-called giant baby is actually 3 days udnerweight--5.5 pounds as of Thursday. Which definitely means that he or she needs some more time in there.
So I got to go home at 6:00 that evening, but my doctor is still putting me on bed rest indefinitely. I should not really even be at the computer right now, but my readings have been good so far today, so...
Now this Saturday night/Sunday morning was the worst. I had a headache that started at 5 PM Saturday night and got progressively worse, and I was throwing up by Sunday morning. Since that's a warning sign of pre-eclampsia, and the doctor had said to go to the hospital if this were to happen, Scott brought me in. Luckily (or not) it was just the worst migraine I had ever had and my blood pressure numbers were already much closer to normal. However, I could not stop throwing up until after 2:30 on Sunday afternoon and the pain would not cease..but then it was over by Sunday night. The worst part was that when I asked for something for the migraine, the nurses prescribed what I already had at home--regular strength Tylenol, which I couldn't keep down anyway. Anyone who has ever had a migraine knows what a joke that is!
So now Scott has to do everything--drive me to my appointments, cooking, dog care, shopping, everything--which sounds like quite a picnic for me, but I feel pretty guilty about it. And reclining all day is not too comfortable. However, it is a great motivator to have this baby and to recover quickly from the birth. Just walking around feels like a forbidden treat, and to be able to do that (albeit with losing sleep) is going to be great.
The one who loves my bed rest the most is Bubba. Every day is bed rest for him--he sits right next to me on the couch and is very content.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
"At Least I’m Not Poor!": A Story of Thanksgiving Revenge
My most vivid memory of childhood Thanksgiving is my mother getting up at 5 AM to put the turkey in and making a giant bowl of French Canadian stuffing to go with it. It’s kind of like the filling in Tourtieres, and my Nana used to make it. This was before my father was a vegetarian, obviously, and made us be vegetarians, too, as the stuffing was made of ground pork, onions , golden raisins, mashed potatoes, and, the staple of all stuffings in New England: Bell’s Seasoning. When I moved to Illinois I could not find Bell’s at the Jewel in Bloomington, so I had to settle for something generically called “Poultry Seasoning” which was a poor substitute. It has to be Bell’s. I make this stuffing now occasionally, with either ground turkey or “veggie crumbles,” and although I have no memory of what pork tasted like, I suspect that in this stuffing it was really good. I am the last one in the family to continue making this stuffing, since the other cousins in my generation don’t really like it (nor do most of my aunts) and this makes me more determined to keep the tradition alive, since it’s really the only remotely “ethnic” recipe we have.
Thanksgiving at my Nana’s house meant that the five cousins, me being the oldest and my cousin Jason the youngest (we are six years apart) would usually dress up, get our picture taken in front of Nana’s fireplace, and then we would all eat. Afterwards, when we were old enough, were several rounds of cards. We played for chips sometimes and sometimes money, or chips that stood for money (although I don’t think they were ever really cashed in.) My Nana was a big fan of cards and bingo, and would often get together with her “ladies” in her kitchen, where they shouted and cursed and ate ritz crackers with the cheese you squeeze from a can.
The cousins were divided into two neat groups: two girls (Erin and I, two years apart) and two boys (Christian and my brother, also two years apart) until Jason came along, upsetting the balance. Jason was the baby, almost four years younger than Erin, and although I must mention that he grew up to be a talented artist and a wonderful human being with a great sense of humor, we did not always treat him well. Especially Christian, who is so hard to describe I really can only do it through a list of facts: Christian was hit by a car on three separate occasions as a child, and each time he sustained practically no injuries. He was small and skinny but moved faster and had the loudest voice and most rapid-fire speech of any little kid I’ve ever met. Also, he was a blurter—he just said what he thought, always, and it was usually the thing everyone else was too polite to say (he pointed out to my father on many occasions that he was going bald, the irony being that by age 19, Chris himself had lost most of his hair. He also spent most of my eighth birthday party marching around our house announcing that our Nana was wearing a wig.)
On one Thanksgiving, Jason was playing cards with all of us for the first time. He was still little, so he was learning, but he was smart and getting the hang of it. However, he was far from winning, and his pile of chips was dwindling. Just starting to get a little tired and crabby, he pointed out something Chris had done that had seemed unfair (perhaps peeking at someone’s cards or something like that—Chris never could sit still for a minute.) Chris took one look at Jason’s small pile of poker chips and laughed: “At least I’m not poor.” Then the crying started.
Flash forward many years later, and Jason is grown up and has a Master’s Degree and a lucrative new job. Chris is a few years away from enlisting in the Iraq war, still working part time, and not sure what he wants to do with his life. We are playing cards again, and Jason is still losing. As Chris celebrates his victory, Jason has one last parting shot: “Maybe you won, but at least I’m not poor.”
Although I will see neither Chris nor Jason this Thanksgiving, as Chris is in Iraq, working in one of Sadam Hussein’s former palaces, and Jason is spending the holiday with his wife’s family, I will be thinking of them.
Another family tradition I hope endures along with the stuffing: well-timed revenge.
Thanksgiving at my Nana’s house meant that the five cousins, me being the oldest and my cousin Jason the youngest (we are six years apart) would usually dress up, get our picture taken in front of Nana’s fireplace, and then we would all eat. Afterwards, when we were old enough, were several rounds of cards. We played for chips sometimes and sometimes money, or chips that stood for money (although I don’t think they were ever really cashed in.) My Nana was a big fan of cards and bingo, and would often get together with her “ladies” in her kitchen, where they shouted and cursed and ate ritz crackers with the cheese you squeeze from a can.
The cousins were divided into two neat groups: two girls (Erin and I, two years apart) and two boys (Christian and my brother, also two years apart) until Jason came along, upsetting the balance. Jason was the baby, almost four years younger than Erin, and although I must mention that he grew up to be a talented artist and a wonderful human being with a great sense of humor, we did not always treat him well. Especially Christian, who is so hard to describe I really can only do it through a list of facts: Christian was hit by a car on three separate occasions as a child, and each time he sustained practically no injuries. He was small and skinny but moved faster and had the loudest voice and most rapid-fire speech of any little kid I’ve ever met. Also, he was a blurter—he just said what he thought, always, and it was usually the thing everyone else was too polite to say (he pointed out to my father on many occasions that he was going bald, the irony being that by age 19, Chris himself had lost most of his hair. He also spent most of my eighth birthday party marching around our house announcing that our Nana was wearing a wig.)
On one Thanksgiving, Jason was playing cards with all of us for the first time. He was still little, so he was learning, but he was smart and getting the hang of it. However, he was far from winning, and his pile of chips was dwindling. Just starting to get a little tired and crabby, he pointed out something Chris had done that had seemed unfair (perhaps peeking at someone’s cards or something like that—Chris never could sit still for a minute.) Chris took one look at Jason’s small pile of poker chips and laughed: “At least I’m not poor.” Then the crying started.
Flash forward many years later, and Jason is grown up and has a Master’s Degree and a lucrative new job. Chris is a few years away from enlisting in the Iraq war, still working part time, and not sure what he wants to do with his life. We are playing cards again, and Jason is still losing. As Chris celebrates his victory, Jason has one last parting shot: “Maybe you won, but at least I’m not poor.”
Although I will see neither Chris nor Jason this Thanksgiving, as Chris is in Iraq, working in one of Sadam Hussein’s former palaces, and Jason is spending the holiday with his wife’s family, I will be thinking of them.
Another family tradition I hope endures along with the stuffing: well-timed revenge.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Poisoner
Right now Scott is fighting what might be the flu (I hope it is not) and he is making me very grateful that I have had the H1N1 vaccine. I was lucky to get it; a friend of my mother’s works at a doctor’s office up in Laconia, NH, and, back in October, told me that they had plenty of doses. I took the trip up there and waited in no line whatsoever to get the shot, which took just a few seconds. A weird thing happened that night, though: I woke up at 3 AM (not unusual nowadays) with an incredible chill—I could not stop shaking and my teeth were chattering; I could not get warm. Then I started sweating. This all lasted about a half hour, then it was gone and I was fine. A reaction to the shot? I remember at the time thinking that I had made a horrible mistake, and that somehow I was getting the swine flu because of the vaccine.
In my family we are pretty dramatic about illness, and sometimes for good reason. My brother contracted mono as an infant and was sick for a long time, and I used to get fevers so high that I would hallucinate and have conversations with people who were not there. Admittedly, there was something oddly calming about seeing things, and I remember in one fever dream seeing a marble go around a track on the ceiling, rolling into a hole until another would pop up, like a pinball game.
I also allegedly poisoned my father with mercury when I was a small child. While my mother went to night class, he babysat us (yes, we considered it that, even though he lived with us, mostly because his powers of supervision were sorely lacking) and one time I was playing with a thermometer that suddenly broke. How I did not get poisoned I do not know, but he later ate an orange at that same table and apparently got some mercury on the orange. I don’t remember any of this after that point, but when my mother got home she found him doubled over in pain and called a nurse friend of hers who indicated that it sounded like mercury poisoning. Maybe the mercury is to blame for the high level of idiopathic autoimmune antibodies in my blood (that no doctor has been able to discern why they are there or what they are doing—all they know is that I have them in quantities equal to women with full-blown lupus, but I do not have any known autoimmune disease) but this is just a far-fetched theory.
Maybe all of this is the reason I am terrified of eating food that has gone bad and will throw things out at the slightest provocation, something that both my husband and father find troubling (both have actually had food poisoning and continue to ignore or shrug aside “sell by” or expiration dates.) Whenever I am at my parents’ house I have to check the expiration dates on everything in the fridge and then ask when things were first opened. My father had a jar of pickles in there last summer that expired in 1996 ("They're still good! They're pickles!"). Being pregnant has only made it worse—if I eat the wrong thing, or something not on the ever-growing “do not consume while pregnant” list, I could poison my baby, so I am vigilant. I thought it might get better when the baby is born, but at my breastfeeding class I was handed a list of foods not to consume while breastfeeding. On the up side, I was also handed a free sample of these strips called “milkscreen” that bills itself as a “home test for alcohol in breast milk.” It’s like a breathalyzer for breast milk—you drink a glass of wine, wait an hour, then see if the alcohol has cleared out of your system before you nurse. If only they made those for every potential hazard I might consume, I would be all set.
In my family we are pretty dramatic about illness, and sometimes for good reason. My brother contracted mono as an infant and was sick for a long time, and I used to get fevers so high that I would hallucinate and have conversations with people who were not there. Admittedly, there was something oddly calming about seeing things, and I remember in one fever dream seeing a marble go around a track on the ceiling, rolling into a hole until another would pop up, like a pinball game.
I also allegedly poisoned my father with mercury when I was a small child. While my mother went to night class, he babysat us (yes, we considered it that, even though he lived with us, mostly because his powers of supervision were sorely lacking) and one time I was playing with a thermometer that suddenly broke. How I did not get poisoned I do not know, but he later ate an orange at that same table and apparently got some mercury on the orange. I don’t remember any of this after that point, but when my mother got home she found him doubled over in pain and called a nurse friend of hers who indicated that it sounded like mercury poisoning. Maybe the mercury is to blame for the high level of idiopathic autoimmune antibodies in my blood (that no doctor has been able to discern why they are there or what they are doing—all they know is that I have them in quantities equal to women with full-blown lupus, but I do not have any known autoimmune disease) but this is just a far-fetched theory.
Maybe all of this is the reason I am terrified of eating food that has gone bad and will throw things out at the slightest provocation, something that both my husband and father find troubling (both have actually had food poisoning and continue to ignore or shrug aside “sell by” or expiration dates.) Whenever I am at my parents’ house I have to check the expiration dates on everything in the fridge and then ask when things were first opened. My father had a jar of pickles in there last summer that expired in 1996 ("They're still good! They're pickles!"). Being pregnant has only made it worse—if I eat the wrong thing, or something not on the ever-growing “do not consume while pregnant” list, I could poison my baby, so I am vigilant. I thought it might get better when the baby is born, but at my breastfeeding class I was handed a list of foods not to consume while breastfeeding. On the up side, I was also handed a free sample of these strips called “milkscreen” that bills itself as a “home test for alcohol in breast milk.” It’s like a breathalyzer for breast milk—you drink a glass of wine, wait an hour, then see if the alcohol has cleared out of your system before you nurse. If only they made those for every potential hazard I might consume, I would be all set.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Lactation Education
Because Scott and I live so close to Vermont, and because I am giving birth in January (according to WMUR, the “most likely month for an ice storm”), we chose Brattleboro Memorial Hospital as the place where I will give birth. Well, I chose it, and Scott had no objection. Although it’s a smaller hospital than the one in Keene, it has something that even Dartmouth/Hitchcock in Lebanon, which resembles a large shopping mall, does not: five lactation consultants (most city hospitals have two or three). Vermonters are dead serious about breastfeeding, and I am fully confident at this point that if I were to start nursing my child in the middle of a public street, I would not only be warmly encouraged but would possibly get my picture in the paper, the way that dogs dressed in cute rain outfits or children holding flags eating ice cream do.
I was excited to get the chance to take the “Breastfeeding Basics” class because all of their other childbirth classes are on Wednesdays at 6:00, when I usually teach. This time, I got to be the student, because Veteran’s Day fell on a Wednesday. I like to think of myself as the kind of student I would want to have: making eye contact with the teacher, asking good questions, fully invested in what I am being taught. I couldn't wait to take on that role again.
Some background on Brattleboro: it’s pretty crunchy, even by Vermont standards. And not exactly hippie-ish, but a lot of transplanted New Yorkers and other city folk who left the city life to start organic farms or art studios or become aromatherapists. I am in no way complaining about this; it means a marked absence of big box stores, a fantastic farmer’s market, decent restaurants, and an unusually active downtown, even in the evening. It means you can bring your dog practically anywhere and you can get good falafel to go. If I want to find a fair trade, organic hemp baby sling suitable for men or women, I can find one in five minutes, right between the human-rights themed bookstore and the Indian grocery. Not too bad for a small, relatively rural area.
The one problem I have with the place is that everyone seems to be an expert in something and they want to share this expertise with you. When I decided last year to start up ice skating again for exercise, I went to the (very nice) Brattleboro rink. No sooner had I tentatively made my way around the rink a few times when I was stopped by one of many skaters who commented on my technique (or lack thereof): “You’re really just walking on the ice. You should be gliding, one foot at a time, like this.” He meant well, but after showing me the right way to do it and critiquing my attempts, he went whirling into the center of the rink, where the other skating whizzes (including what appeared to be a woman in her eighties) were spinning and twirling. I circled around the ring a few times with my halting steps, and then I left.
Breastfeeding class kind of felt like that, because most of the people there were not first-time moms—one woman had her last baby 20 years ago—and they seemed to want to share their experiences rather than learn. I had also been hoping for more celebration and anticipation on the part of my fellow pregnant women, but everyone looked either bored, or stressed, or unhappy. Most everyone was quiet and seemed self-conscious, but I wasn't sure why--for me, it was a comfort to be in a room with other pregnant women for a change. Only one of the younger moms, a pretty redheaded woman due the same week that I am, was smiling and seemed excited to be there.
Most of the class centered around the idea of “latching on,” which is how the baby attaches to the breast. Apparently, if this is done wrong, the baby does not get enough milk and, in the words of the lactation nurse, it can cause “damage” to the breast. She showed us an Australian DVD of the proper procedure, wherein enormous-breasted Australian women with 1980s hairdos and great accents fed their babies with an impressive confidence. It actually took only a few minutes to show us this “nipple tuck” technique, and the rest of the time the nurse made sure we understood the benefits of breastfeeding. We had the chance to apply our knowledge using baby dolls with the kind of open mouths you see on blow up dolls in adult stores, but the only one who truly opted to do this was the transgender partner of the older woman (whom she referred to as "he," so I will here) who had been doing Suduko with the fake baby swaddled on his shoulder up until that point. We all appreciated his participation, as the nurse had been trying to urge us to get involved and try it out.
What I learned: How to do the “nipple tuck technique. And that I am not a good student, but the kind of student I dislike. I don't really want to think about what that means for my teaching, but I will have to at some point. After I master the breastfeeding thing.
I was excited to get the chance to take the “Breastfeeding Basics” class because all of their other childbirth classes are on Wednesdays at 6:00, when I usually teach. This time, I got to be the student, because Veteran’s Day fell on a Wednesday. I like to think of myself as the kind of student I would want to have: making eye contact with the teacher, asking good questions, fully invested in what I am being taught. I couldn't wait to take on that role again.
Some background on Brattleboro: it’s pretty crunchy, even by Vermont standards. And not exactly hippie-ish, but a lot of transplanted New Yorkers and other city folk who left the city life to start organic farms or art studios or become aromatherapists. I am in no way complaining about this; it means a marked absence of big box stores, a fantastic farmer’s market, decent restaurants, and an unusually active downtown, even in the evening. It means you can bring your dog practically anywhere and you can get good falafel to go. If I want to find a fair trade, organic hemp baby sling suitable for men or women, I can find one in five minutes, right between the human-rights themed bookstore and the Indian grocery. Not too bad for a small, relatively rural area.
The one problem I have with the place is that everyone seems to be an expert in something and they want to share this expertise with you. When I decided last year to start up ice skating again for exercise, I went to the (very nice) Brattleboro rink. No sooner had I tentatively made my way around the rink a few times when I was stopped by one of many skaters who commented on my technique (or lack thereof): “You’re really just walking on the ice. You should be gliding, one foot at a time, like this.” He meant well, but after showing me the right way to do it and critiquing my attempts, he went whirling into the center of the rink, where the other skating whizzes (including what appeared to be a woman in her eighties) were spinning and twirling. I circled around the ring a few times with my halting steps, and then I left.
Breastfeeding class kind of felt like that, because most of the people there were not first-time moms—one woman had her last baby 20 years ago—and they seemed to want to share their experiences rather than learn. I had also been hoping for more celebration and anticipation on the part of my fellow pregnant women, but everyone looked either bored, or stressed, or unhappy. Most everyone was quiet and seemed self-conscious, but I wasn't sure why--for me, it was a comfort to be in a room with other pregnant women for a change. Only one of the younger moms, a pretty redheaded woman due the same week that I am, was smiling and seemed excited to be there.
Most of the class centered around the idea of “latching on,” which is how the baby attaches to the breast. Apparently, if this is done wrong, the baby does not get enough milk and, in the words of the lactation nurse, it can cause “damage” to the breast. She showed us an Australian DVD of the proper procedure, wherein enormous-breasted Australian women with 1980s hairdos and great accents fed their babies with an impressive confidence. It actually took only a few minutes to show us this “nipple tuck” technique, and the rest of the time the nurse made sure we understood the benefits of breastfeeding. We had the chance to apply our knowledge using baby dolls with the kind of open mouths you see on blow up dolls in adult stores, but the only one who truly opted to do this was the transgender partner of the older woman (whom she referred to as "he," so I will here) who had been doing Suduko with the fake baby swaddled on his shoulder up until that point. We all appreciated his participation, as the nurse had been trying to urge us to get involved and try it out.
What I learned: How to do the “nipple tuck technique. And that I am not a good student, but the kind of student I dislike. I don't really want to think about what that means for my teaching, but I will have to at some point. After I master the breastfeeding thing.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Tony and Ann's
My father has been a bit of a health nut for as long as I can remember. There’s a new term for this in scientific circles: “orthorexia,” which means compulsion to eat only healthy foods. He is also easily swayed by trends, which makes it worse. When I was little, he went on a Weight Watchers kick and during that time, instead of butter, we had to eat their version of margarine, which was chalk white, tasted vaguely of vegetable shortening and cream cheese, and didn’t melt. Instead of bacon, we had to eat something called Sizzle Lean, defatted spam-like strips of some combination of meat and chemicals. Instead of candy, we had dietetic pudding sweetened with saccharine, with an aftertaste that lasted even after you brushed your teeth.
Yet even he made an exception for Tony and Ann’s pizza. This pizza is so hard to describe, but every single person I know from the Greater Lowell, Massachusetts area loved it, even those who were known to be picky eaters. For instance, you could count on one hand the foods my aunt and cousin will eat, but they still love Tony and Ann’s. The place is legendary—whole websites went up in lament when they closed five years ago, and it was even paid tribute in background scenes on the Simpsons. Many people, my family included, bought a bunch of pizzas and froze them, savoring their very last bites of the greasy cheese and sweet sauce.
Part of the problem is that any description I offer of this pizza is going to make it sound disgusting, in the way that people who describe the deliciousness of steamed clams only make others not want to eat them. Language is inadequate, but I will try: The first thing you will see when opening up a box of Tony and Ann’s pizza is a pool of grease on the top. Now, I do not like grease as a rule (I don’t eat fast food, ever) but bear with me. Under the grease is an amorphous mass of cheese with some red spice sprinkled on top. The cheese melts like no other cheese I have seen, and it has a spicy undertone that I just can’t place. The crust is thin and usually soggy. Then the best part: the sauce. I don’t know what is in it, and no one does. It’s really sweet and spicy, and even for those who dislike really sweet sauce (which I normally do) it’s addictive. It may have some kind of sausage in it. I don’t even care. My father, who is a vegetarian and asks forty million questions at restaurants about what is in the food, doesn’t even care and would eat Tony and Ann’s even if he heard a rumor it was made with baby seal blubber.
Tony and Ann’s opened in the 1950s and was just a little square take-out building for years until they put some benches and tables out front for people to eat outside in good weather. We often just ate the pizza in the car, piles of napkins mandatory. My great-grandmother, my grandmother, all of my family, have gone there for generations. I am quite sure my mother ate Tony and Ann’s pizza when she was pregnant with me. When it closed, it was as though a crucial tie to the past had been lost. The whole city mourned. Competitors claimed their pizzas were "just like Tony and Ann's" but nothing could take its place.
And then we found out that it was reopening. Tony has since died, but Ann is still living, and her children are taking over the business. It is opening in a new spot, but most Tony and Ann fans I know would go anywhere, any distance, for this pizza. During my baby shower several weeks ago, my aunt shared a story about actually driving past Ann’s house and almost stopping in to ask about it (I ought to mention here that she is a normal person and not a stalker). Then she went over to the new site of the restaurant and even looked in the dumpster to see signs of activity. Nothing. But on the way home from the shower, she drove by and saw a sign saying “Opening soon.” She called right away.
If it is open in time, Joanne will serve Tony and Ann’s pizza on Thanksgiving instead of turkey. I can see the boxes now, all piled up, and I can smell the cheese and sauce, and I can hear everyone fighting for the first piece. I can’t wait to treat my baby, who can now experience tasting flavors, to this pizza. It’s going to be a great Thanksgiving.
Yet even he made an exception for Tony and Ann’s pizza. This pizza is so hard to describe, but every single person I know from the Greater Lowell, Massachusetts area loved it, even those who were known to be picky eaters. For instance, you could count on one hand the foods my aunt and cousin will eat, but they still love Tony and Ann’s. The place is legendary—whole websites went up in lament when they closed five years ago, and it was even paid tribute in background scenes on the Simpsons. Many people, my family included, bought a bunch of pizzas and froze them, savoring their very last bites of the greasy cheese and sweet sauce.
Part of the problem is that any description I offer of this pizza is going to make it sound disgusting, in the way that people who describe the deliciousness of steamed clams only make others not want to eat them. Language is inadequate, but I will try: The first thing you will see when opening up a box of Tony and Ann’s pizza is a pool of grease on the top. Now, I do not like grease as a rule (I don’t eat fast food, ever) but bear with me. Under the grease is an amorphous mass of cheese with some red spice sprinkled on top. The cheese melts like no other cheese I have seen, and it has a spicy undertone that I just can’t place. The crust is thin and usually soggy. Then the best part: the sauce. I don’t know what is in it, and no one does. It’s really sweet and spicy, and even for those who dislike really sweet sauce (which I normally do) it’s addictive. It may have some kind of sausage in it. I don’t even care. My father, who is a vegetarian and asks forty million questions at restaurants about what is in the food, doesn’t even care and would eat Tony and Ann’s even if he heard a rumor it was made with baby seal blubber.
Tony and Ann’s opened in the 1950s and was just a little square take-out building for years until they put some benches and tables out front for people to eat outside in good weather. We often just ate the pizza in the car, piles of napkins mandatory. My great-grandmother, my grandmother, all of my family, have gone there for generations. I am quite sure my mother ate Tony and Ann’s pizza when she was pregnant with me. When it closed, it was as though a crucial tie to the past had been lost. The whole city mourned. Competitors claimed their pizzas were "just like Tony and Ann's" but nothing could take its place.
And then we found out that it was reopening. Tony has since died, but Ann is still living, and her children are taking over the business. It is opening in a new spot, but most Tony and Ann fans I know would go anywhere, any distance, for this pizza. During my baby shower several weeks ago, my aunt shared a story about actually driving past Ann’s house and almost stopping in to ask about it (I ought to mention here that she is a normal person and not a stalker). Then she went over to the new site of the restaurant and even looked in the dumpster to see signs of activity. Nothing. But on the way home from the shower, she drove by and saw a sign saying “Opening soon.” She called right away.
If it is open in time, Joanne will serve Tony and Ann’s pizza on Thanksgiving instead of turkey. I can see the boxes now, all piled up, and I can smell the cheese and sauce, and I can hear everyone fighting for the first piece. I can’t wait to treat my baby, who can now experience tasting flavors, to this pizza. It’s going to be a great Thanksgiving.
Friday, October 30, 2009
You're Dressed as What?
I tried to dress as Laurie Strode, Jamie Lee Curtis’ character from Halloween, one year and no one got it. I put on clogs and knee socks, a long, dumpy denim skirt, did my hair in the flattened-out feathered style with a barrette on one side, wore a button-down shirt, and carried some books. To be particularly clever, I had included an abnormal psychology book, because I thought it hinted that Laurie herself would have been interested in the deviant mind—and that it added some foreshadowing to my ensemble. I put on the final touch—some subtle yet frosted lipstick—and I imagined the other girls, in their boring, store-bought costumes, coming up to me: “You’re that girl from Halloween! What a great idea!”
I was in college and it was an all-girl party in our all-girl dorm, which meant we were spared the sexy witch, sexy devil, and sexy nurse costumes. Our RA was Raggedy Ann, and one girl was a police officer. There were scary costumes: warty witches and mummies, and Frankenstein’s Monster with a Bride of Frankenstein, with impressively high hair and voltage wires in her head. Since it was a Catholic college, and nuns lived in our dorm, I was most curious to see whether or not anyone would dress as a nun, or whether the actual nuns would dress as something other than nuns. No, and no. We played music (probably something by Bon Jovi), drank non-alcoholic punch, and lay in wait for the real party, at the boy’s college, later that night.
All night people tried to guess my costume: A hippie? A psychology professor? A preppie? A guidance counselor? An ex-nun? Someone from the 70s? (OK, getting closer…) A nerd? And, my personal favorite, from later on at the boys’ party: “An ugly girl?” Did these people not watch horror movies? Did they not see my hair, and the title of the book in my hand? The knee socks….the CLOGS, for goodness’ sake! I tried to think of what I could have done to have made it all clearer, and drew a blank.
People at the party had no shortage of ideas: hatchet in the head? Gunshot wound? Carry a wanted poster of Michael Myers, warning of his escape from the institution? A shirt with “Laurie Strode” on it, or a shirt with the name of the film on it? Bring with you a guy dressed like Michael Myers and have him follow you around all night? And, probably the same guy who guessed “ugly girl,” had this to offer: “Who’s Laurie Strode?” These suggestions were not only stupid but insulting. First, Laurie was not shot, nor did she get a hatchet in the head. And to have to resort to a shirt with her name on it….It just didn’t seem fair. Anyone could just dress up as Michael Myers and everyone would get it immediately, but here I was trying to be the actual main character of the film: dorky, awkward, ultimately brave survivor Laurie, and I kept having to explain it, over and over.
Why did I connect so much with Laurie? Well, all of the above, but Jamie Lee Curtis does such a good job making Laurie a complex girl in a genre that usually doesn’t allow for much female complexity. For one, she’s a high school girl who lives in home that seems to contain no adults, and her world is adult-free, save for cops, psychiatrists, and male psychopaths (check out the scene where she comes home and sits on her bed after seeing the van—there’s something so creepy about her isolation, when it’s just her and the breeze coming through her filmy curtains.) There are no adult women in this film. Laurie is a babysitter, the grownup, and although she tries to fit in with her pot-smoking, boy-crazy friends, she is too serious and too responsible to be young, though she is naïve about men. Unlike her friend Annie, there is no way Laurie is going to do laundry in her underwear or get drunk and have sex with her boyfriend in a stranger’s bed. Laurie’s both mom and little girl, and somehow just can’t enter that adolescent world. Annie ends up leaving the child she’s babysitting with Laurie, but we all know how that worked out.
At that party, watching the drinking and flirting around me, I started to feel like Laurie Strode—too old, but also too young to be a part of it all. And, I’ll admit it, still indignant that no one understood my costume. A guy in a gorilla suit showed up and we tried to guess who it was. One of my friends threw up outside the townhouse and then sat in it, leaving a red stain on the butt of her white angel costume, which actually made her costume more interesting: menstruating angel. The clogs started to hurt my feet, so I took them off, and I ended up losing my abnormal psychology book. The next year I dressed as a porcelain doll, in a black velvet bathrobe with lace at the collar and a red ribbon, white makeup and ribbons in my hair. When no one got that one, either, though, it didn’t matter quite as much.
*This post is dedicated to my good friend Chris Breu--enjoy Halloween :)
I was in college and it was an all-girl party in our all-girl dorm, which meant we were spared the sexy witch, sexy devil, and sexy nurse costumes. Our RA was Raggedy Ann, and one girl was a police officer. There were scary costumes: warty witches and mummies, and Frankenstein’s Monster with a Bride of Frankenstein, with impressively high hair and voltage wires in her head. Since it was a Catholic college, and nuns lived in our dorm, I was most curious to see whether or not anyone would dress as a nun, or whether the actual nuns would dress as something other than nuns. No, and no. We played music (probably something by Bon Jovi), drank non-alcoholic punch, and lay in wait for the real party, at the boy’s college, later that night.
All night people tried to guess my costume: A hippie? A psychology professor? A preppie? A guidance counselor? An ex-nun? Someone from the 70s? (OK, getting closer…) A nerd? And, my personal favorite, from later on at the boys’ party: “An ugly girl?” Did these people not watch horror movies? Did they not see my hair, and the title of the book in my hand? The knee socks….the CLOGS, for goodness’ sake! I tried to think of what I could have done to have made it all clearer, and drew a blank.
People at the party had no shortage of ideas: hatchet in the head? Gunshot wound? Carry a wanted poster of Michael Myers, warning of his escape from the institution? A shirt with “Laurie Strode” on it, or a shirt with the name of the film on it? Bring with you a guy dressed like Michael Myers and have him follow you around all night? And, probably the same guy who guessed “ugly girl,” had this to offer: “Who’s Laurie Strode?” These suggestions were not only stupid but insulting. First, Laurie was not shot, nor did she get a hatchet in the head. And to have to resort to a shirt with her name on it….It just didn’t seem fair. Anyone could just dress up as Michael Myers and everyone would get it immediately, but here I was trying to be the actual main character of the film: dorky, awkward, ultimately brave survivor Laurie, and I kept having to explain it, over and over.
Why did I connect so much with Laurie? Well, all of the above, but Jamie Lee Curtis does such a good job making Laurie a complex girl in a genre that usually doesn’t allow for much female complexity. For one, she’s a high school girl who lives in home that seems to contain no adults, and her world is adult-free, save for cops, psychiatrists, and male psychopaths (check out the scene where she comes home and sits on her bed after seeing the van—there’s something so creepy about her isolation, when it’s just her and the breeze coming through her filmy curtains.) There are no adult women in this film. Laurie is a babysitter, the grownup, and although she tries to fit in with her pot-smoking, boy-crazy friends, she is too serious and too responsible to be young, though she is naïve about men. Unlike her friend Annie, there is no way Laurie is going to do laundry in her underwear or get drunk and have sex with her boyfriend in a stranger’s bed. Laurie’s both mom and little girl, and somehow just can’t enter that adolescent world. Annie ends up leaving the child she’s babysitting with Laurie, but we all know how that worked out.
At that party, watching the drinking and flirting around me, I started to feel like Laurie Strode—too old, but also too young to be a part of it all. And, I’ll admit it, still indignant that no one understood my costume. A guy in a gorilla suit showed up and we tried to guess who it was. One of my friends threw up outside the townhouse and then sat in it, leaving a red stain on the butt of her white angel costume, which actually made her costume more interesting: menstruating angel. The clogs started to hurt my feet, so I took them off, and I ended up losing my abnormal psychology book. The next year I dressed as a porcelain doll, in a black velvet bathrobe with lace at the collar and a red ribbon, white makeup and ribbons in my hair. When no one got that one, either, though, it didn’t matter quite as much.
*This post is dedicated to my good friend Chris Breu--enjoy Halloween :)
Thursday, October 22, 2009
The Third Kim
One of the college stories I most enjoy telling people is the time that I was tried by my college’s judicial board for voodoo. The problem is, it wasn’t really for voodoo, and it wasn’t just me. And the image that most sticks with me from that day is my philosophy professor--the same one who taught me about Kant and Descartes and Nietszche--intently looking up the skirt of a Barbie doll while a group of nuns, faculty, and other students looked on.
I went to an all-women’s Catholic college that, like my girls’ Catholic high school, went co-ed right around the time I left. When I was there, nuns lived in the first floor of our dorm, right below us. They had their own TV room from which one of my friends once purloined a box of chocolates and a TV Guide. Boys were not allowed up in the rooms except for about two hours a day and had to be signed in and out.
The atmosphere did not seem that oppressive to me, mostly because I had heard horror stories from friends at other colleges about their roommates' constantly stoned boyfriends spending the night and taking food from the fridge and just generally smelling up the place. I never had to step over drunk people or clean up vomit or sleep in the lounge while a roommate hosted her boyfriend in the room, and since for most of college I didn’t have a serious boyfriend anyhow, I really had no need to host anyone, either.
Mostly the single girls in my dorm competed for the same half dozen decent-looking guys at a nearby college known for its flight program and for alcoholism. It should tell you something that the one boy I really liked from that school was from Manhattan and really wanted to go to art school, but his father wanted him to be a pilot. He left after one semester. The college, like ours, was small, so the six passable young men were valuable commodities and the subject of many rifts and arguments among my group of friends.
This is how we met Kim, who was a commuter and lived in an apartment downtown with her grandmother. She came with us to parties at the boys’ college, and she became especially close to a couple of my friends—I can’t say I ever knew her well. However, she was hard to forget. Even though big hair and stage makeup were the rage at the time (see my own photo), Kim had bigger hair and wore more makeup than anyone else we knew: blue and white eye shadow up to the brow, black liquid liner, frosty pink lipstick, pancake foundation. Although Kim hung out with us, she was often the topic of conversation, mostly because boys liked her, and also because of the makeup. It was rumored that she never took it off—that she slept in her makeup each night after spraying her entire face with Aqua Net—and then, upon waking, applied another layer right on top of it, as one might add new coats when painting a room. I, who could barely draw a straight line with pencil eyeliner, secretly admired her precision and discipline.
Somehow (and I don’t remember all the details) one of my friends found out that one of the boys she liked had made an overture to Kim, and the talk started to get vicious. She had had an abortion, it was rumored (and at a Catholic college, this was especially taboo). Worse, the abortion hadn’t “taken” and she’d been hospitalized. In retrospect, I’m sure that none of this was true, but it didn’t matter. We would meet in one of our rooms and share the latest Kim gossip, and the next day, she’d come over and visit and it was as if nothing had happened, nothing had been said—just sly glances exchanged when she would speak, or eye rolls behind her back.
One night someone had the idea that Kim should pay for what she had done (even though exactly what she had done remained, in truth, unclear.) We took a doll that a little girl had left in our lounge, and stuck pins in her and wrote horrible things about Kim on her legs and body. Then, giggling nervously, we left the doll outside of the room of the girl Kim had been visiting in our dorm.
We didn’t see her again until we sat at the table at the judicial board. Our sentence was twofold: an official written apology and mandatory group counseling with a counselor who ended up trying to be our friend and sharing stories about her own college pranks. I remember a few words from the report: “We are concerned about the deterioration of your friendships” which even then I knew was wrong. This was not even about friendship—it was about enjoying being cruel to another person just because we could. And all around me at that table were sympathetic eyes who just wanted to give our fresh-faced, non-commuter selves another chance.
I went to an all-women’s Catholic college that, like my girls’ Catholic high school, went co-ed right around the time I left. When I was there, nuns lived in the first floor of our dorm, right below us. They had their own TV room from which one of my friends once purloined a box of chocolates and a TV Guide. Boys were not allowed up in the rooms except for about two hours a day and had to be signed in and out.
The atmosphere did not seem that oppressive to me, mostly because I had heard horror stories from friends at other colleges about their roommates' constantly stoned boyfriends spending the night and taking food from the fridge and just generally smelling up the place. I never had to step over drunk people or clean up vomit or sleep in the lounge while a roommate hosted her boyfriend in the room, and since for most of college I didn’t have a serious boyfriend anyhow, I really had no need to host anyone, either.
Mostly the single girls in my dorm competed for the same half dozen decent-looking guys at a nearby college known for its flight program and for alcoholism. It should tell you something that the one boy I really liked from that school was from Manhattan and really wanted to go to art school, but his father wanted him to be a pilot. He left after one semester. The college, like ours, was small, so the six passable young men were valuable commodities and the subject of many rifts and arguments among my group of friends.
This is how we met Kim, who was a commuter and lived in an apartment downtown with her grandmother. She came with us to parties at the boys’ college, and she became especially close to a couple of my friends—I can’t say I ever knew her well. However, she was hard to forget. Even though big hair and stage makeup were the rage at the time (see my own photo), Kim had bigger hair and wore more makeup than anyone else we knew: blue and white eye shadow up to the brow, black liquid liner, frosty pink lipstick, pancake foundation. Although Kim hung out with us, she was often the topic of conversation, mostly because boys liked her, and also because of the makeup. It was rumored that she never took it off—that she slept in her makeup each night after spraying her entire face with Aqua Net—and then, upon waking, applied another layer right on top of it, as one might add new coats when painting a room. I, who could barely draw a straight line with pencil eyeliner, secretly admired her precision and discipline.
Somehow (and I don’t remember all the details) one of my friends found out that one of the boys she liked had made an overture to Kim, and the talk started to get vicious. She had had an abortion, it was rumored (and at a Catholic college, this was especially taboo). Worse, the abortion hadn’t “taken” and she’d been hospitalized. In retrospect, I’m sure that none of this was true, but it didn’t matter. We would meet in one of our rooms and share the latest Kim gossip, and the next day, she’d come over and visit and it was as if nothing had happened, nothing had been said—just sly glances exchanged when she would speak, or eye rolls behind her back.
One night someone had the idea that Kim should pay for what she had done (even though exactly what she had done remained, in truth, unclear.) We took a doll that a little girl had left in our lounge, and stuck pins in her and wrote horrible things about Kim on her legs and body. Then, giggling nervously, we left the doll outside of the room of the girl Kim had been visiting in our dorm.
We didn’t see her again until we sat at the table at the judicial board. Our sentence was twofold: an official written apology and mandatory group counseling with a counselor who ended up trying to be our friend and sharing stories about her own college pranks. I remember a few words from the report: “We are concerned about the deterioration of your friendships” which even then I knew was wrong. This was not even about friendship—it was about enjoying being cruel to another person just because we could. And all around me at that table were sympathetic eyes who just wanted to give our fresh-faced, non-commuter selves another chance.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Copycat Raccoon Girl
Recently I read that a new version of the film “Single White Female” was coming out, starring one of the Gossip Girl actresses (the dark-haired one) and someone who sort of looks like Megan Fox but is not Megan Fox. I remember seeing the first film when a twenty-something grad student, and the whole point of it seemed to be to make people enjoy watching Jennifer Jason Leigh, who played a young woman obsessed with imitating and then taking over the life of her roommate, get her comeuppance for being a solitary loser and she-stalker.
There are lots of movie plots like this: lonely misfit wants the life of seemingly successful and perfect woman. Yet there is something particularly troubling about those films with the “copycat” angle. In much of popular culture, the copycat is bland, impotent, and weak—we think of copycat killers this way, even if their crimes are as brutal as the ones committed by murderers they imitate. Yet the urge to imitate someone one perceives as more powerful, more successful, more liked, is a powerful one in the life of a young girl—and it doesn’t mean she’s bound to end up chasing her roommate in the basement of a New York apartment with an ice pick.
When I was in fifth grade, I spent nearly a year as a copycat. I didn’t just copy one person, though, at first. One day a girl named Stephanie got a great feathered haircut, and when I went to get my own hair cut, I asked for the same style. Someone in my class got new blue and white Nikes, and I got blue and white ones, too. All small things. Then I made a new friend named Kimber. Kimber was part of a group of six or so girls who were really involved in school—Kimber’s friend Kristen was the lead in the school’s production of Annie, and Allison was in gymnastics, and Suzanne played soccer. Kimber had straight brown hair and braces and wasn’t especially pretty or outgoing, but she always seemed quietly confident and was good at everything she tried. But what made Kimber stand out was her absolute love of raccoons. She knew everything about them: that they didn’t make saliva, that they were nocturnal, that they had sharp claws. She did every science project or report for English about raccoons and had a bedful of raccoon stuffed animals and a bookcase filled with raccoon stories. Whenever we talked about animals in science class, the teacher would say, “And Kimber, what kind of habitat do raccoons live in?” or “Kimber, are raccoons and possums related?”
This expertise on raccoons gave Kimber a place, an identity. I wanted that, too. Maybe I felt at the time that it was somehow the raccoon itself that gave Kimber her power, but it never occurred to me to choose horses, or dogs, or Gila monsters. It had to be raccoons. I became the copycat raccoon girl. I wrote an English report on raccoons and a children’s book called “Kim’s Raccoon,” about a brunette fifth grader named Kim who had a pet raccoon that she raised from a baby, that I sent to Harper and Row publishers (because they had published Little House in the Prairie, I thought they liked books about girls and nature. They sent me a personal letter instead of the usual rejection, which I still have.) My school friends must have thought this odd, but no one said anything until the science fair incident.
The fifth grade science fair in Andover was one of those events where parental involvement was both expected and intense. The problem was that my parents did not believe that parents should do these projects for their children, and here I was competing against kids whose parents not only helped them, but purchased expensive electrical equipment and terrariums and special fluorescent lights in the effort to produce a winning entry. I had no chance. My contribution was a poster of the life cycle of the raccoon, a poor, crudely drawn shadow of Kimber’s project about raccoon habitats, which contained her own wildlife photography and a den made of mud and sticks. When my friends, including Kimber, saw my poster, the looks on their faces were a mixture of discomfort and pity, and somehow even I knew that this had to stop.
Through it all, I never wanted Kimber out of the picture, and I never wanted to have her life. I wanted the sense of purpose that her raccoon love gave her, that air of expertise and confidence of knowing more than others about one subject. I still fight the urge to copy others: I want to write with the sophistication and intelligence of my friend Elizabeth, or to know as much about music as my husband, or to be as physically fit as my friend Debbie, but I can be inspired by them without feeling compelled to imitate. What I want to see is a movie where the copycat somehow moves beyond it and ends up even better off than the person she copied in the first place.
There are lots of movie plots like this: lonely misfit wants the life of seemingly successful and perfect woman. Yet there is something particularly troubling about those films with the “copycat” angle. In much of popular culture, the copycat is bland, impotent, and weak—we think of copycat killers this way, even if their crimes are as brutal as the ones committed by murderers they imitate. Yet the urge to imitate someone one perceives as more powerful, more successful, more liked, is a powerful one in the life of a young girl—and it doesn’t mean she’s bound to end up chasing her roommate in the basement of a New York apartment with an ice pick.
When I was in fifth grade, I spent nearly a year as a copycat. I didn’t just copy one person, though, at first. One day a girl named Stephanie got a great feathered haircut, and when I went to get my own hair cut, I asked for the same style. Someone in my class got new blue and white Nikes, and I got blue and white ones, too. All small things. Then I made a new friend named Kimber. Kimber was part of a group of six or so girls who were really involved in school—Kimber’s friend Kristen was the lead in the school’s production of Annie, and Allison was in gymnastics, and Suzanne played soccer. Kimber had straight brown hair and braces and wasn’t especially pretty or outgoing, but she always seemed quietly confident and was good at everything she tried. But what made Kimber stand out was her absolute love of raccoons. She knew everything about them: that they didn’t make saliva, that they were nocturnal, that they had sharp claws. She did every science project or report for English about raccoons and had a bedful of raccoon stuffed animals and a bookcase filled with raccoon stories. Whenever we talked about animals in science class, the teacher would say, “And Kimber, what kind of habitat do raccoons live in?” or “Kimber, are raccoons and possums related?”
This expertise on raccoons gave Kimber a place, an identity. I wanted that, too. Maybe I felt at the time that it was somehow the raccoon itself that gave Kimber her power, but it never occurred to me to choose horses, or dogs, or Gila monsters. It had to be raccoons. I became the copycat raccoon girl. I wrote an English report on raccoons and a children’s book called “Kim’s Raccoon,” about a brunette fifth grader named Kim who had a pet raccoon that she raised from a baby, that I sent to Harper and Row publishers (because they had published Little House in the Prairie, I thought they liked books about girls and nature. They sent me a personal letter instead of the usual rejection, which I still have.) My school friends must have thought this odd, but no one said anything until the science fair incident.
The fifth grade science fair in Andover was one of those events where parental involvement was both expected and intense. The problem was that my parents did not believe that parents should do these projects for their children, and here I was competing against kids whose parents not only helped them, but purchased expensive electrical equipment and terrariums and special fluorescent lights in the effort to produce a winning entry. I had no chance. My contribution was a poster of the life cycle of the raccoon, a poor, crudely drawn shadow of Kimber’s project about raccoon habitats, which contained her own wildlife photography and a den made of mud and sticks. When my friends, including Kimber, saw my poster, the looks on their faces were a mixture of discomfort and pity, and somehow even I knew that this had to stop.
Through it all, I never wanted Kimber out of the picture, and I never wanted to have her life. I wanted the sense of purpose that her raccoon love gave her, that air of expertise and confidence of knowing more than others about one subject. I still fight the urge to copy others: I want to write with the sophistication and intelligence of my friend Elizabeth, or to know as much about music as my husband, or to be as physically fit as my friend Debbie, but I can be inspired by them without feeling compelled to imitate. What I want to see is a movie where the copycat somehow moves beyond it and ends up even better off than the person she copied in the first place.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Kim
I never wore my uniform to the restaurant, but she did, striding up to the double doors of the pancake house wearing a leather jacket with her apron in hand. I admired her confidence; I mean, what if she had to stop and change a flat, or saw someone she knew at the gas station on the way? These things didn’t seem to bother Kim. She didn’t worry over small mistakes in the orders, or when the cook, a cute boy I had gone to high school with—a physics whiz who dropped out of engineering school and ended up full-time at the restaurant--grumbled over unclear orders and our slow responses.
I was working at the pancake house near Concord, a good 45 minutes from home, to pick up some extra hours in the summer after college. I was saving for graduate school, for the English program I would start that January, and I didn’t have much else to do but work. Some days I would work at the pancake house near home, some days in Hooksett when they were short of help. On my first day in Hooksett I walked into a completely empty restaurant and worried that I had made a mistake. Why had they called me in when I was so clearly not needed? Kim came out to the front, menu in hand, disappointed to see that I was not a customer. At the Gilford restaurant, it was common practice for girls who were not needed to go home so the ones with seniority could make some money.
“I can leave,” I said to them both.
Kim and the cook exchanged looks.
“You drove all that way, “Brett said. “Why don’t you just wait and see if it picks up?”
Kim nodded. “It will be good to have another girl to talk to.”
Kim was easy to be around. At first I thought she was older than her 23 years, because she had already had small smoker’s lines around her eyes and always had a suspicious squint in her eyes, but in the pictures I saw of her on the news she still looked in her early 30s at age 42. After I realized she wouldn’t resent me for being there, we got to talking. Kim was saving up for nursing school. She already lived on her own, in her own apartment, while I lived with my parents until I would drive to Illinois for graduate school. I felt young and awkward next to her, and even her flirting with Brett was quick and sharp, like that of a sitcom waitress.
Kim and I had one thing in common: we were done with the past, with high school and college and New Hampshire. We would eat deep-fried potato nuggets on those slow days and talk about what was coming next in our lives, when we would be done with pancake waitressing and finally get to be respected and have careers. Kim wasn’t squeamish, she revealed, when I told her I could never be a nurse because I couldn't stand needles or vomit or blood. She didn’t like writing that much, she told me, when I told her I wanted to study English. We made jokes about customers, even though we were nice to their faces. While we poured drinks in the waitress station, Kim would say she needed a smoke, and then pop some potato nuggets off a plate into her mouth, singing a song from the public service announcements about healthy eating that aired during Saturday morning cartoons in the 1970s (“Here munch this, here munch that/ Soon you’re not just bored, you’re fat”). She would laugh at me when I would change out of my uniform into a skirt and heels at the end of our shift, after counting what was probably less than $20 in tips for six or seven hours’ work, but she never suggested I go home so she could make more money.
A couple of times that summer and fall Kim came up to our Gilford restaurant to work, and I was always happy to see her, and I have thought of her from time to time, though we never hung out outside of work, and we didn’t keep in touch. But when I found out she had been murdered last Saturday, stabbed in her bed by four adolescent boys who chose her home because it was remote, and who also seriously injured her 11-year old daughter—a girl who had just watched her mother die--there was only one thought that brought comfort: Kim had stayed in New Hampshire, had gotten married, lived in a nice house in the country, and had a daughter. And she had become a nurse, after all. I picture her wearing her uniform to work, moving through the sliding glass doors of the hospital , calmly dealing with whatever came her way.
I was working at the pancake house near Concord, a good 45 minutes from home, to pick up some extra hours in the summer after college. I was saving for graduate school, for the English program I would start that January, and I didn’t have much else to do but work. Some days I would work at the pancake house near home, some days in Hooksett when they were short of help. On my first day in Hooksett I walked into a completely empty restaurant and worried that I had made a mistake. Why had they called me in when I was so clearly not needed? Kim came out to the front, menu in hand, disappointed to see that I was not a customer. At the Gilford restaurant, it was common practice for girls who were not needed to go home so the ones with seniority could make some money.
“I can leave,” I said to them both.
Kim and the cook exchanged looks.
“You drove all that way, “Brett said. “Why don’t you just wait and see if it picks up?”
Kim nodded. “It will be good to have another girl to talk to.”
Kim was easy to be around. At first I thought she was older than her 23 years, because she had already had small smoker’s lines around her eyes and always had a suspicious squint in her eyes, but in the pictures I saw of her on the news she still looked in her early 30s at age 42. After I realized she wouldn’t resent me for being there, we got to talking. Kim was saving up for nursing school. She already lived on her own, in her own apartment, while I lived with my parents until I would drive to Illinois for graduate school. I felt young and awkward next to her, and even her flirting with Brett was quick and sharp, like that of a sitcom waitress.
Kim and I had one thing in common: we were done with the past, with high school and college and New Hampshire. We would eat deep-fried potato nuggets on those slow days and talk about what was coming next in our lives, when we would be done with pancake waitressing and finally get to be respected and have careers. Kim wasn’t squeamish, she revealed, when I told her I could never be a nurse because I couldn't stand needles or vomit or blood. She didn’t like writing that much, she told me, when I told her I wanted to study English. We made jokes about customers, even though we were nice to their faces. While we poured drinks in the waitress station, Kim would say she needed a smoke, and then pop some potato nuggets off a plate into her mouth, singing a song from the public service announcements about healthy eating that aired during Saturday morning cartoons in the 1970s (“Here munch this, here munch that/ Soon you’re not just bored, you’re fat”). She would laugh at me when I would change out of my uniform into a skirt and heels at the end of our shift, after counting what was probably less than $20 in tips for six or seven hours’ work, but she never suggested I go home so she could make more money.
A couple of times that summer and fall Kim came up to our Gilford restaurant to work, and I was always happy to see her, and I have thought of her from time to time, though we never hung out outside of work, and we didn’t keep in touch. But when I found out she had been murdered last Saturday, stabbed in her bed by four adolescent boys who chose her home because it was remote, and who also seriously injured her 11-year old daughter—a girl who had just watched her mother die--there was only one thought that brought comfort: Kim had stayed in New Hampshire, had gotten married, lived in a nice house in the country, and had a daughter. And she had become a nurse, after all. I picture her wearing her uniform to work, moving through the sliding glass doors of the hospital , calmly dealing with whatever came her way.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
We Have Ways of Making you Talk
It might surprise people who know me now, but when I was in second and third grade I refused to speak in public unless I absolutely had to. Teachers would call me “Kristi” and I didn’t correct them; they learned otherwise only after my parents’ first meeting with them each fall. Now, I talked a lot at home, but I would not talk at school, not because I had nothing to say but because I was shy and didn’t want anyone to notice me.
The problem is, if you take silence too far, someone will notice it. One day Miss Coza let me know that the speech teacher would be coming by to take me out of class during math. A creature of routine, I found this terrifying and pondered sneaking out of school at recess to walk home. Having learned my lesson from the first grade short bus debacle, I stayed put and waited for the speech lady to take me away.
The speech therapist was kind but also spoke in such a loud, slow voice ("Why HELL-O Kirsti. How ARE you toDAY?") that I was worried she thought I was either deaf or didn't speak English. She had me read some words out loud from a series of cards, and, satisfied that I could actually utter audible sounds, tried the psychological approach.
“Why don’t you talk in class?” she finally asked me, the loud, slow voice modulated now.
I don’t remember my answer, but I’m sure it was short and vague. At the time, I didn’t know, but I knew I was afraid to speak and that it was frustrating. I didn’t want to be afraid to talk. I wasn’t happy being like that. I just didn’t know any other way to be. And there were rewards for not talking: my conduct grade was consistently excellent, and teachers did not want to pressure a shy girl who might start crying at any moment.
The upshot of it was that the speech therapist decided that it was beyond her powers as a speech therapist to help a child who could actually speak without lisp, impediment, or other diagnosable problem, and sent me back to class.
That was not the end of it, unfortunately. My father so happened to be the school psychologist at Varnum, so although he could not test me, I had to go elsewhere for psychological testing. Apparently all was well with those tests, but I still wouldn’t talk at school. Nowadays, the solution to children’s social problems often seems to be involvement in sports (Violent child? Sign him up for hockey! Social misfit? Try soccer!), but public schools in Lowell didn’t have organized sports, and my mother’s view on sports has always been very easy to summarize: “Sports are stupid.” She had another idea: Elocution lessons.
Elocution is another word for “public speaking,” but focuses more on performance than persuasion. It was taught a great deal in the nineteenth century, most often in connection with acquiring refinement and poise, and the pieces students read were literary: parts of plays, essays, poems and stories. Even in 1976, elocution was hopelessly old-fashioned, but my mother was determined, and she talked Eileen’s mother into sending her as well. The elocution teacher, Mrs. Lawson, a former librarian, lived in a brick apartment building downtown that was filled with plants, cumbersome furniture, and stacks of books. Everything was old but not shabby—we thought it was elegant, and figured Mrs. Lawson must be rich because she had a four-poster canopy bed and beautiful, flowered carpets, the kind my mother said are only for people who don’t have kids or pets.
Armed with our elocution readers, books filled with short pieces for recitation that I’m sure were discards with “Lowell Public Library” stamped on the cover pages, we read for Mrs. Lawson each Monday night, learning how to sit straight and to project our voices (but not too much—no shouting). Mrs. Lawson never gave those “aren’t you cute” looks that many old ladies did; she was all briskness, and her goal was to get us ready for our public recital at a local auditorium, where all of her students would be performing. She also taught piano and flute, so she had a full roster. Eileen and I practiced after school, although Eileen’s performance on recital night was hindered by her drunken father loudly complaining about Ginger having dragged him there. My mother tells me now that although the look on Ginger’s face broke her heart, Mrs. Lawson’s glare at Daniel, which actually shut him up for a few minutes, almost made up for it.
My piece was a story about mice, and when the recital came, I read it straight through, despite my terror, looking directly at the audience and speaking clearly and loudly. It might seem disingenuous to say that elocution lessons cured me of my public shyness, but I got my first B in conduct at school the next term.
The problem is, if you take silence too far, someone will notice it. One day Miss Coza let me know that the speech teacher would be coming by to take me out of class during math. A creature of routine, I found this terrifying and pondered sneaking out of school at recess to walk home. Having learned my lesson from the first grade short bus debacle, I stayed put and waited for the speech lady to take me away.
The speech therapist was kind but also spoke in such a loud, slow voice ("Why HELL-O Kirsti. How ARE you toDAY?") that I was worried she thought I was either deaf or didn't speak English. She had me read some words out loud from a series of cards, and, satisfied that I could actually utter audible sounds, tried the psychological approach.
“Why don’t you talk in class?” she finally asked me, the loud, slow voice modulated now.
I don’t remember my answer, but I’m sure it was short and vague. At the time, I didn’t know, but I knew I was afraid to speak and that it was frustrating. I didn’t want to be afraid to talk. I wasn’t happy being like that. I just didn’t know any other way to be. And there were rewards for not talking: my conduct grade was consistently excellent, and teachers did not want to pressure a shy girl who might start crying at any moment.
The upshot of it was that the speech therapist decided that it was beyond her powers as a speech therapist to help a child who could actually speak without lisp, impediment, or other diagnosable problem, and sent me back to class.
That was not the end of it, unfortunately. My father so happened to be the school psychologist at Varnum, so although he could not test me, I had to go elsewhere for psychological testing. Apparently all was well with those tests, but I still wouldn’t talk at school. Nowadays, the solution to children’s social problems often seems to be involvement in sports (Violent child? Sign him up for hockey! Social misfit? Try soccer!), but public schools in Lowell didn’t have organized sports, and my mother’s view on sports has always been very easy to summarize: “Sports are stupid.” She had another idea: Elocution lessons.
Elocution is another word for “public speaking,” but focuses more on performance than persuasion. It was taught a great deal in the nineteenth century, most often in connection with acquiring refinement and poise, and the pieces students read were literary: parts of plays, essays, poems and stories. Even in 1976, elocution was hopelessly old-fashioned, but my mother was determined, and she talked Eileen’s mother into sending her as well. The elocution teacher, Mrs. Lawson, a former librarian, lived in a brick apartment building downtown that was filled with plants, cumbersome furniture, and stacks of books. Everything was old but not shabby—we thought it was elegant, and figured Mrs. Lawson must be rich because she had a four-poster canopy bed and beautiful, flowered carpets, the kind my mother said are only for people who don’t have kids or pets.
Armed with our elocution readers, books filled with short pieces for recitation that I’m sure were discards with “Lowell Public Library” stamped on the cover pages, we read for Mrs. Lawson each Monday night, learning how to sit straight and to project our voices (but not too much—no shouting). Mrs. Lawson never gave those “aren’t you cute” looks that many old ladies did; she was all briskness, and her goal was to get us ready for our public recital at a local auditorium, where all of her students would be performing. She also taught piano and flute, so she had a full roster. Eileen and I practiced after school, although Eileen’s performance on recital night was hindered by her drunken father loudly complaining about Ginger having dragged him there. My mother tells me now that although the look on Ginger’s face broke her heart, Mrs. Lawson’s glare at Daniel, which actually shut him up for a few minutes, almost made up for it.
My piece was a story about mice, and when the recital came, I read it straight through, despite my terror, looking directly at the audience and speaking clearly and loudly. It might seem disingenuous to say that elocution lessons cured me of my public shyness, but I got my first B in conduct at school the next term.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
My Teacher, the Inanimate Test Packet
Moving away from Lowell was a big deal for my family, though I didn’t fully realize it at the time. This was because most people didn’t move away from Lowell. Andover Street, the road connecting Lowell to Andover, was the fanciest street in town—lined with mansions that we used to compare when driving by, mansions once inhabited by the owners of the textile mills where members of my family had worked. Some had towers and stained glass windows, wrap-around porches and balconies.
We moved to a newer subdivision that had once been acres of farmland; the stone walls still stood, but they didn’t match with the evenly spaced ranch houses all painted in coordinated earth tones, and their placement seemed random. Our house had a deck facing the woods and a large level yard, and in the summer we could not really see any of our neighbors, which was quite a switch from Lowell, where we could see people eating dinner from our living room. It was not really a neighborhood; we all kept to ourselves. Everyone in Andover seemed to speak English and golf, everyone was white, and the Welcome Wagon lady came to our doorstep and left a welcome basket with things like free samples for laundry detergent and attorneys’ business cards. My parents were on friendly terms with the neighbors, but they never became friends with any of them.
The school in Andover was much bigger and more modern than my beloved Varnum, and it was also something called “open concept” which meant that instead of walls it had wall-like partitions that functioned as walls. I took a bus to school for the first time and had to sit with my little brother, who was starting the first grade. The kids in Andover seemed much hipper and older than the ones in Lowell—they had nicer backpacks and sneakers, and they wore real Levis corduroys instead of Sears Toughskins. I felt awkward and babyish in my jumper dress and knee socks.
But the biggest adjustment of all was learning reading and math from a series of test books instead of a sentient being. I was used to reading out loud in small groups in English, and for math, being led by the teacher in a lesson and then doing worksheets. At the elementary school in Andover, they practiced something called “individualized instruction, “ which meant that you worked on one math packet on your own and then went on to the next one. The math packets were like SAT tests which require penciling in the circles with your answer, and I’m not sure whether a teacher or machine read and scored them. Reading was the same way: the school was committed to something called AIRS (Andover Individualized Reading System) which meant that we went to the book selection shelves in the hallway, picked out a book, read it, filled in the appropriate answers on the worksheet, and then picked out the next level of book, and so on. Our packets were kept, in alphabetical order, in a file cabinet; it was our responsibility to retrieve them and then return them when the bell rang. It was school with no teachers; we had a homeroom teacher, and someone who taught us social studies, gym, and art (there were no individualized modules for these subjects) but that was it. AIRS was not taught—it was monitored and supervised.
My first day in this system confused me. I was told to pick out a book, so I picked out a first grade book, even though I was in fourth grade, because I figured it would allow me to work my way up and start with easy questions I was sure to get right. If the goal was to get correct answers, this seemed the way to do it. I remember the homeroom teacher scolding me when she saw me reading The Windy Day (yes, I do remember the exact title of the book), which wasn’t even a chapter book and had only a single line of text on each page: “That’s a baby book. You need to choose a book for fourth graders, unless you have a problem reading. Can you read a fourth grade book?” I could read a fourth grade book, and even a seventh grade book. However, I said nothing to Mrs. Kelly, and the next time I chose an appropriate fourth-grade book.
This is probably why I cringe whenever I hear educational acronyms or buzzwords being used. I understand that it’s not the acronyms themselves that are the problem, but every time I hear the term NEASC or NCATE or hear terms like “critical thinking” or “experiential learning” I think back to that school in Andover, to rows of fourth-graders reading silently and filling in bubbles with their # 2 pencils, and I think, was I really supposed to learn from that? It is probably also why walking around my former high school and seeing lockers and walls and rooms is strangely satisfying. We like to think of all new ideas in education as progress, but those freshly painted walls tell the real story.
We moved to a newer subdivision that had once been acres of farmland; the stone walls still stood, but they didn’t match with the evenly spaced ranch houses all painted in coordinated earth tones, and their placement seemed random. Our house had a deck facing the woods and a large level yard, and in the summer we could not really see any of our neighbors, which was quite a switch from Lowell, where we could see people eating dinner from our living room. It was not really a neighborhood; we all kept to ourselves. Everyone in Andover seemed to speak English and golf, everyone was white, and the Welcome Wagon lady came to our doorstep and left a welcome basket with things like free samples for laundry detergent and attorneys’ business cards. My parents were on friendly terms with the neighbors, but they never became friends with any of them.
The school in Andover was much bigger and more modern than my beloved Varnum, and it was also something called “open concept” which meant that instead of walls it had wall-like partitions that functioned as walls. I took a bus to school for the first time and had to sit with my little brother, who was starting the first grade. The kids in Andover seemed much hipper and older than the ones in Lowell—they had nicer backpacks and sneakers, and they wore real Levis corduroys instead of Sears Toughskins. I felt awkward and babyish in my jumper dress and knee socks.
But the biggest adjustment of all was learning reading and math from a series of test books instead of a sentient being. I was used to reading out loud in small groups in English, and for math, being led by the teacher in a lesson and then doing worksheets. At the elementary school in Andover, they practiced something called “individualized instruction, “ which meant that you worked on one math packet on your own and then went on to the next one. The math packets were like SAT tests which require penciling in the circles with your answer, and I’m not sure whether a teacher or machine read and scored them. Reading was the same way: the school was committed to something called AIRS (Andover Individualized Reading System) which meant that we went to the book selection shelves in the hallway, picked out a book, read it, filled in the appropriate answers on the worksheet, and then picked out the next level of book, and so on. Our packets were kept, in alphabetical order, in a file cabinet; it was our responsibility to retrieve them and then return them when the bell rang. It was school with no teachers; we had a homeroom teacher, and someone who taught us social studies, gym, and art (there were no individualized modules for these subjects) but that was it. AIRS was not taught—it was monitored and supervised.
My first day in this system confused me. I was told to pick out a book, so I picked out a first grade book, even though I was in fourth grade, because I figured it would allow me to work my way up and start with easy questions I was sure to get right. If the goal was to get correct answers, this seemed the way to do it. I remember the homeroom teacher scolding me when she saw me reading The Windy Day (yes, I do remember the exact title of the book), which wasn’t even a chapter book and had only a single line of text on each page: “That’s a baby book. You need to choose a book for fourth graders, unless you have a problem reading. Can you read a fourth grade book?” I could read a fourth grade book, and even a seventh grade book. However, I said nothing to Mrs. Kelly, and the next time I chose an appropriate fourth-grade book.
This is probably why I cringe whenever I hear educational acronyms or buzzwords being used. I understand that it’s not the acronyms themselves that are the problem, but every time I hear the term NEASC or NCATE or hear terms like “critical thinking” or “experiential learning” I think back to that school in Andover, to rows of fourth-graders reading silently and filling in bubbles with their # 2 pencils, and I think, was I really supposed to learn from that? It is probably also why walking around my former high school and seeing lockers and walls and rooms is strangely satisfying. We like to think of all new ideas in education as progress, but those freshly painted walls tell the real story.
Friday, July 31, 2009
The Fun Aunt
I was very lucky that my mother was the oldest in her family, and that her youngest sister was just 16 when I was born. That’s not so unusual; Scott has an aunt who is four years older than he is, and you even see aunts and uncles who are younger than their nieces and nephews, like in Little House on the Prairie where Laura and Ma were pregnant at the same time.
My grandmother (who will be heretofore referred to as Nana) lived about fifteen minutes from us, also in Lowell, in a brown ranch house in a family neighborhood not too far from downtown. In her fifties, she had not one but two kids still living at home—my aunt Joanne, in her twenties, and my uncle Mike (who was 14 when I was born). Joanne had moved out for a while, married her boyfriend at 18, had two kids, got divorced, and moved, with her two kids, back in with Nana. Mike never left (he really never left—he still lives there, but he owns the house now and lives there with his wife and daughter.)
This might not sound like such great material for comedy, but my brother and I had a fantastic time every time we went to Nana’s house. My cousins were there, and Nana had already raised her own kids. Mostly she was out playing cards or bingo or having her card ladies over; to her credit, she didn’t even care if we sat under the table and giggled while they played. The ladies smoked, laughed loudly, and ate crackers with cheese you squeeze out of a can. Nana wasn’t the one babysitting us anyhow—that was Joanne’s job. And she was the best babysitter I ever had, without question.
Joanne was cool. She had long, straight brown hair and wore t-shirts, jeans and flipflops, not polyester pants and printed blouses. She even had one of those leather visors with studs in them, like a biker. She gave me all of her celebrity and fashion magazines when she was done reading them, and she loved records—one time she had us all dance around in her room to Michael Jackson’s “Rock with You” from “Off the Wall" with the blue strobe light flashing. She was also a fan of the Beatles, Heart, and Supertramp, and we liked to look at album covers with Heart, Linda Rondstadt, and Olivia Newton John on them and talk about who was prettier and why (the dark-haired woman from Heart. Because she could play guitar). When she took us for ice cream (which was often) she always asked, afterward, “What do you say?” to which we were supposed to shout in unison “Thanks a heap, creep!.” She often used the word "shithead" in regular conversation, not in anger, but to make us laugh. When the movie 10 was popular she styled our hair like Bo Derek’s (which took a long time) and then we sat out on the front porch and did what she called “waving to cuties” who would drive by.
Life there was very different from life at home. First, we didn't always have to eat at the table, and we were free to turn down what was offered and eat something else. Joanne is the pickiest eater I know or ever will know, as is her daughter and now her granddaughter, but she did cook one thing on a regular basis: a dish known as “yuck-yuck,” which, as far as I remember, was made of ground beef, noodles, and tomato sauce. Her tastes are not without contradiction—she hates tomatoes, but will eat some things with tomato sauce and loves Bloody Marys. She is still a big believer in options. At her fiftieth birthday party a few years ago, there were two lasagnas: not a vegetarian one and a meat one, as you might expect, but one with tomatoes and one without tomatoes (though it still has sauce). Every holiday she makes two banana cream pies: one with bananas and one with no bananas (though it still has banana filling).
My Nana’s house was not the quiet place one might think of when recalling grandma’s house. The music I most associate with being there are the opening chords of “Smoke on the Water,” because my uncle Mike, who lived in the basement at the time, often had his band over and you could feel the music vibrate through the floor—it was that loud. Sometimes the band guys, shaggy-haired, bearded dudes with jean jackets, would come up—to Joanne’s delight—but we were never supposed to go down there when they were around: I think that the was the only rule , and it was Mike’s. Nothing cramps your style like five little kids running around.
Yet when I think about how Joanne was when we were kids, she seemed to genuinely like hanging out with us. She never seemed bored or annoyed, and I don’t remember her ever getting mad or yelling; in fact, she found tantrums funny (which took away any reason to have one) and she didn’t mind it if we swore or engaged in light combat. No one really ever got hurt anyhow. I have a niece and nephew of my own now, and remembering how Joanne was (and still is) with us has made the experience of being an aunt even better; maybe I am now the “fun aunt.”
My grandmother (who will be heretofore referred to as Nana) lived about fifteen minutes from us, also in Lowell, in a brown ranch house in a family neighborhood not too far from downtown. In her fifties, she had not one but two kids still living at home—my aunt Joanne, in her twenties, and my uncle Mike (who was 14 when I was born). Joanne had moved out for a while, married her boyfriend at 18, had two kids, got divorced, and moved, with her two kids, back in with Nana. Mike never left (he really never left—he still lives there, but he owns the house now and lives there with his wife and daughter.)
This might not sound like such great material for comedy, but my brother and I had a fantastic time every time we went to Nana’s house. My cousins were there, and Nana had already raised her own kids. Mostly she was out playing cards or bingo or having her card ladies over; to her credit, she didn’t even care if we sat under the table and giggled while they played. The ladies smoked, laughed loudly, and ate crackers with cheese you squeeze out of a can. Nana wasn’t the one babysitting us anyhow—that was Joanne’s job. And she was the best babysitter I ever had, without question.
Joanne was cool. She had long, straight brown hair and wore t-shirts, jeans and flipflops, not polyester pants and printed blouses. She even had one of those leather visors with studs in them, like a biker. She gave me all of her celebrity and fashion magazines when she was done reading them, and she loved records—one time she had us all dance around in her room to Michael Jackson’s “Rock with You” from “Off the Wall" with the blue strobe light flashing. She was also a fan of the Beatles, Heart, and Supertramp, and we liked to look at album covers with Heart, Linda Rondstadt, and Olivia Newton John on them and talk about who was prettier and why (the dark-haired woman from Heart. Because she could play guitar). When she took us for ice cream (which was often) she always asked, afterward, “What do you say?” to which we were supposed to shout in unison “Thanks a heap, creep!.” She often used the word "shithead" in regular conversation, not in anger, but to make us laugh. When the movie 10 was popular she styled our hair like Bo Derek’s (which took a long time) and then we sat out on the front porch and did what she called “waving to cuties” who would drive by.
Life there was very different from life at home. First, we didn't always have to eat at the table, and we were free to turn down what was offered and eat something else. Joanne is the pickiest eater I know or ever will know, as is her daughter and now her granddaughter, but she did cook one thing on a regular basis: a dish known as “yuck-yuck,” which, as far as I remember, was made of ground beef, noodles, and tomato sauce. Her tastes are not without contradiction—she hates tomatoes, but will eat some things with tomato sauce and loves Bloody Marys. She is still a big believer in options. At her fiftieth birthday party a few years ago, there were two lasagnas: not a vegetarian one and a meat one, as you might expect, but one with tomatoes and one without tomatoes (though it still has sauce). Every holiday she makes two banana cream pies: one with bananas and one with no bananas (though it still has banana filling).
My Nana’s house was not the quiet place one might think of when recalling grandma’s house. The music I most associate with being there are the opening chords of “Smoke on the Water,” because my uncle Mike, who lived in the basement at the time, often had his band over and you could feel the music vibrate through the floor—it was that loud. Sometimes the band guys, shaggy-haired, bearded dudes with jean jackets, would come up—to Joanne’s delight—but we were never supposed to go down there when they were around: I think that the was the only rule , and it was Mike’s. Nothing cramps your style like five little kids running around.
Yet when I think about how Joanne was when we were kids, she seemed to genuinely like hanging out with us. She never seemed bored or annoyed, and I don’t remember her ever getting mad or yelling; in fact, she found tantrums funny (which took away any reason to have one) and she didn’t mind it if we swore or engaged in light combat. No one really ever got hurt anyhow. I have a niece and nephew of my own now, and remembering how Joanne was (and still is) with us has made the experience of being an aunt even better; maybe I am now the “fun aunt.”
Sunday, July 26, 2009
A Whole World of Problems, Brought to you by Judy Blume and V.C. Andrews
I read an edited collection last year titled Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume. Basically, the thread that ties the essays together is that Judy Blume’s characters are relatable to young girls, and this relatability is timeless because Blume really captures what it is like to be a pubescent or adolescent girl. If that sounds a bit circular, it is. Most of the women in the anthology lovingly describe these books as central to their formative years, maybe in the same way that kids today will look back on the Harry Potter or Twilight series. As one contributor put it, “the books made me see that I was normal.” I respectfully disagree.
Now, yes, I read a bunch of these books, but I can only say I really loved one of them: Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, which is semi-autobiographical. I’m not even sure it’s a children’s book, and I mean this as a compliment—it’s about a Jewish family in Miami after the end of World War II. The main character, Sally, is funny and interesting (she has an ongoing fantasy that she spots Hitler in a grocery store or park and blows his cover, bringing him to justice, and she’s constantly trying to figure out the meaning of dirty jokes the teenagers around her tell) and the book does not feel like a vehicle for getting an IMPORTANT MESSAGE across. It’s a good story, and I recommend it. A close second is Blubber (she really gets the way kids turn on each other overnight) and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, written from a boy’s perspective. Up until then, I thought boys had it easy, but the unpredictable hard-ons and wet dreams the character endures in that book made me feel most fortunate. I was also glad I did not live in New Jersey, because it was full of what the main charcter called "social climbers."
The book most often cited in this collection is Are you there God, It’s Me Margaret. This is the book that focuses on menstruation, as well as on choosing a religion, though I’m not sure the two subplots merge all that seamlessly. It was published in 1970, but by 1981 (when I read it) it was already dated: sanitary pads weren’t even called that any longer, and they didn’t use any kind of belt contraption (that really confused me at the time). What was ultimately disappointing about the book, though, was that it was so divorced from my own experience that I was angry that I hadn’t been born just ten years earlier. Margaret and her friends talked about getting their periods! They were excited about it! They wanted breasts! I and my own circle of friends in the Boston suburb of Andover, Massachusetts (home to Philips Academy and a whole lot of kids whose parents want them to get accepted to Philips Academy--basically, social climbers) found menstruation disturbing and horrifying--and we rarely discussed it at all. When we did, we came to two conclusions: First, having your period would make you more likely to attract sharks if you were swimming in the ocean (see previous post). It also provided new opportunities for humiliation at school. One girl in my math class was excused to go to the bathroom one day and she clearly had a visible stain on the back of her jeans. It was the main topic of discussion for month ("Andrea has her period" "Gross!")which also made her a mess, out of control. Had Margaret even considered this?
Breasts, too, were not considered a good thing at my school. They got you ridiculed, not admired: I didn’t see where Blume’s characters were getting this “we must, we must, we must increase our bust,” "Gro-Bra" mentality. We wanted to flatten ours out so no one would notice. Also, we didn’t call them “busts.” The most developed girl in our school, Susan, had breasts that were pointy and worse, asymmetrical, so they pointed in different directions. Better to delay all of that as long as possible.
No, more comforting to me was the Flowers in the Attic series. Now, they had problems: locked in an attic by their own mother, starved, forced to bury their own little brother and to turn to incest. And through it all the adolescent girl just got thinner, and thus more ethereal and beautiful. Relatable, no, but it was something better—it was about people who had it far worse than I did, and were almost pure victims; the teenage girl would never walk around the eighth grade hallways with blood on her cordoroys. Plus, their problems were ones that I would never, ever have to deal with. So I could always pretend I would have handled it better, gotten out somehow, given the mother and grandmother their comeuppance and saved my little brother. Just like Sally J. Freedman, I could be a hero in my own mind. With Margaret I was just another hormone-filled freak.
Now, yes, I read a bunch of these books, but I can only say I really loved one of them: Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, which is semi-autobiographical. I’m not even sure it’s a children’s book, and I mean this as a compliment—it’s about a Jewish family in Miami after the end of World War II. The main character, Sally, is funny and interesting (she has an ongoing fantasy that she spots Hitler in a grocery store or park and blows his cover, bringing him to justice, and she’s constantly trying to figure out the meaning of dirty jokes the teenagers around her tell) and the book does not feel like a vehicle for getting an IMPORTANT MESSAGE across. It’s a good story, and I recommend it. A close second is Blubber (she really gets the way kids turn on each other overnight) and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, written from a boy’s perspective. Up until then, I thought boys had it easy, but the unpredictable hard-ons and wet dreams the character endures in that book made me feel most fortunate. I was also glad I did not live in New Jersey, because it was full of what the main charcter called "social climbers."
The book most often cited in this collection is Are you there God, It’s Me Margaret. This is the book that focuses on menstruation, as well as on choosing a religion, though I’m not sure the two subplots merge all that seamlessly. It was published in 1970, but by 1981 (when I read it) it was already dated: sanitary pads weren’t even called that any longer, and they didn’t use any kind of belt contraption (that really confused me at the time). What was ultimately disappointing about the book, though, was that it was so divorced from my own experience that I was angry that I hadn’t been born just ten years earlier. Margaret and her friends talked about getting their periods! They were excited about it! They wanted breasts! I and my own circle of friends in the Boston suburb of Andover, Massachusetts (home to Philips Academy and a whole lot of kids whose parents want them to get accepted to Philips Academy--basically, social climbers) found menstruation disturbing and horrifying--and we rarely discussed it at all. When we did, we came to two conclusions: First, having your period would make you more likely to attract sharks if you were swimming in the ocean (see previous post). It also provided new opportunities for humiliation at school. One girl in my math class was excused to go to the bathroom one day and she clearly had a visible stain on the back of her jeans. It was the main topic of discussion for month ("Andrea has her period" "Gross!")which also made her a mess, out of control. Had Margaret even considered this?
Breasts, too, were not considered a good thing at my school. They got you ridiculed, not admired: I didn’t see where Blume’s characters were getting this “we must, we must, we must increase our bust,” "Gro-Bra" mentality. We wanted to flatten ours out so no one would notice. Also, we didn’t call them “busts.” The most developed girl in our school, Susan, had breasts that were pointy and worse, asymmetrical, so they pointed in different directions. Better to delay all of that as long as possible.
No, more comforting to me was the Flowers in the Attic series. Now, they had problems: locked in an attic by their own mother, starved, forced to bury their own little brother and to turn to incest. And through it all the adolescent girl just got thinner, and thus more ethereal and beautiful. Relatable, no, but it was something better—it was about people who had it far worse than I did, and were almost pure victims; the teenage girl would never walk around the eighth grade hallways with blood on her cordoroys. Plus, their problems were ones that I would never, ever have to deal with. So I could always pretend I would have handled it better, gotten out somehow, given the mother and grandmother their comeuppance and saved my little brother. Just like Sally J. Freedman, I could be a hero in my own mind. With Margaret I was just another hormone-filled freak.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Postmaturity
"Postmature" is what they call babies who stick around in the womb too long and are born past their due date. While it would seem good and healthy for a baby to stay in that kind of protected environment for as long as possible, it's actually not--babies who are postmature can have trouble breathing, hypoglycemia, lots of scalp hair, and something called "meconium staining" on the skin which means that the baby has pooped all over itself and the poop had nowhere to go. Babies that are postmature can also be too big to deliver vaginally.
I was born three weeks late. It was a relief to my parents that I was at least born two days before I would no longer qualify them for a tax write-off for 1968. Unlike, many postmature babies, I was a normal weight (6 lbs) but I had a ton of hair. My father's first remarks upon seeing me were than I resembled Phyllis Diller, and if you ever saw her, you would know that it's not exactly a compliment. And once I arrived, I wondered if my parents wished I'd stayed in there a bit longer: I was a colicky, constantly screaming, and overall unpleasant baby, at least in the first year.
They rarely let babies reach postmaturity now before a planned C-section is done. For that reason, babies are much more likely to be premature than postmature.
I have read a lot of student writing recently about the idea of maturity (growing up too fast, over-scheduled children, suggestive clothing for young girls) and often hear 22-year-olds referring to themselves as "kids" and people over 30 as "grown ups," although many are paying on their own for college and are much more independent than I was at that age. I have been thinking a lot of how we define adulthood, especially since I just read a study that said that most people over 60 see themselves as much younger than they are (and feel much younger, genuinely, which is pretty good news, right?).
It really struck me,though, when I read a nonfiction piece aloud to my class about a babysitting experience I had when I was 13. I wrote of riding bikes on the weekends with neighborhood kids, and my students thought I should take that part out: "It makes you sound like you were much younger than 13." But I did ride bikes then! They know enough about nonfiction writing to have a ready answer to my protest, though.
All of this made me think of things my mother never would have done at 40--things I regularly engage in that she would never have dreamed of doing:
1. Playing a Nancy Drew video game for three hours straight. Also, owning all of the Nancy Drew games.
2. Blogging and Facebooking--yes, they didn't exist then. But even so.
3. Wearing my hair long (her rule: over 30, cut your hair short)
4. Eating freezy pops. Also, calling them freezy pops.
5. Spending a whole day off reading and catching up on movies and my soap opera (to be fair, she had two kids and was busy all the time...)
I was born three weeks late. It was a relief to my parents that I was at least born two days before I would no longer qualify them for a tax write-off for 1968. Unlike, many postmature babies, I was a normal weight (6 lbs) but I had a ton of hair. My father's first remarks upon seeing me were than I resembled Phyllis Diller, and if you ever saw her, you would know that it's not exactly a compliment. And once I arrived, I wondered if my parents wished I'd stayed in there a bit longer: I was a colicky, constantly screaming, and overall unpleasant baby, at least in the first year.
They rarely let babies reach postmaturity now before a planned C-section is done. For that reason, babies are much more likely to be premature than postmature.
I have read a lot of student writing recently about the idea of maturity (growing up too fast, over-scheduled children, suggestive clothing for young girls) and often hear 22-year-olds referring to themselves as "kids" and people over 30 as "grown ups," although many are paying on their own for college and are much more independent than I was at that age. I have been thinking a lot of how we define adulthood, especially since I just read a study that said that most people over 60 see themselves as much younger than they are (and feel much younger, genuinely, which is pretty good news, right?).
It really struck me,though, when I read a nonfiction piece aloud to my class about a babysitting experience I had when I was 13. I wrote of riding bikes on the weekends with neighborhood kids, and my students thought I should take that part out: "It makes you sound like you were much younger than 13." But I did ride bikes then! They know enough about nonfiction writing to have a ready answer to my protest, though.
All of this made me think of things my mother never would have done at 40--things I regularly engage in that she would never have dreamed of doing:
1. Playing a Nancy Drew video game for three hours straight. Also, owning all of the Nancy Drew games.
2. Blogging and Facebooking--yes, they didn't exist then. But even so.
3. Wearing my hair long (her rule: over 30, cut your hair short)
4. Eating freezy pops. Also, calling them freezy pops.
5. Spending a whole day off reading and catching up on movies and my soap opera (to be fair, she had two kids and was busy all the time...)
Saturday, May 23, 2009
I'm Sailing Away
About ten minutes down the road from the Weirs Boardwalk is a giant outdoor concert stadium called Meadowbrook that tends to book a lot of 70s and 80s acts, like the Moody Blues, Pat Benatar, and Lenyrd Skynerd (I don’t really care whether I spelled that right). Anyway, more than ten years ago it was just a spot in the middle of a field where you could set up your own lawn chair and enjoy some surprisingly well-known country acts. I saw Johnny and June Carter Cash there in 1997, with my dad and Elizabeth Hatmaker. We sat on the lawn on a warm August night and sang “Ring of Fire” while the sun set. For “Rock Island Line” the production involved sound and light effects that made it seem as though a train were coming into the station, and June even took the stage for a while and told stories about her upbringing in between songs, like the Loretta Lynn character in Nashville, but less crazy. It was a great night. I even bought Scott a shirt from that concert, which he still has.
I have been back twice since, once when I bought my mom tickets to see Linda Ronstadt and another time with Scott when we gave both sets of parents tickets to see Prairie Home Companion a couple of years ago. Meadowbrook had become a concrete and steel behemoth, and I was really missing that “concert in the middle of farmland” feel, and also missing Johnny Cash.
Just for the heck of it, I looked up the concert schedule for this summer and was delighted to find that Styx is playing their "Don't Stop Rocking" Tour at Meadowbrook (that's really what they are calling it) with Reo Speedwagon and 38 Special the night of our wedding! Maybe that means that on the boat they'll have "The Styx Experience" play? I hope so! There would be something weird and cool about a tribute band playing 10 minutes away from the actual band, but I'm not all that sure Styx has a tribute band.
Not that I have really listened to Styx regularly since the age of 12, and I run screaming from the room when Scott blasts “Mr. Roboto,” but perhaps the somehow perfect use of it in the Freaks and Geeks pilot (both “Sailing” and “Renegade”) has endeared them to me. There’s also the story Scott has told me of going to Springfield, Illinois to visit the Quackenbushes when he experienced the “greatest Rock and Roll moment ever” when the band came on the stage, screeched “We are Malachai!” and jumped right into “Oh Mama/I’m in fear for my life/From the long arm of the law.” Only in Springfield!
After the wedding ship docks, at 10:00, we have reserved several booths at the back of Patrick’s Pub in Gilford. They have assured me that we can still order food if we’re hungry from the bar menu (their food is good). It’s a ten-minute drive from the Weirs normally, though Patrick’s is next door to Meadowbrook, so we may be fighting the Meadowbrook traffic coming the other way. I wonder if Styx will go to Patrick’s after the concert? Well, one thing is for sure: there will be a lot of Styx fans around, in case you are wondering what the people willing to shell out $80-$100 to see them look like.
So when you are on the Mount Washington on June 27, head up to the top deck at about 9 PM and listen really hard. You just might hear Styx, rocking out over the water.
I have been back twice since, once when I bought my mom tickets to see Linda Ronstadt and another time with Scott when we gave both sets of parents tickets to see Prairie Home Companion a couple of years ago. Meadowbrook had become a concrete and steel behemoth, and I was really missing that “concert in the middle of farmland” feel, and also missing Johnny Cash.
Just for the heck of it, I looked up the concert schedule for this summer and was delighted to find that Styx is playing their "Don't Stop Rocking" Tour at Meadowbrook (that's really what they are calling it) with Reo Speedwagon and 38 Special the night of our wedding! Maybe that means that on the boat they'll have "The Styx Experience" play? I hope so! There would be something weird and cool about a tribute band playing 10 minutes away from the actual band, but I'm not all that sure Styx has a tribute band.
Not that I have really listened to Styx regularly since the age of 12, and I run screaming from the room when Scott blasts “Mr. Roboto,” but perhaps the somehow perfect use of it in the Freaks and Geeks pilot (both “Sailing” and “Renegade”) has endeared them to me. There’s also the story Scott has told me of going to Springfield, Illinois to visit the Quackenbushes when he experienced the “greatest Rock and Roll moment ever” when the band came on the stage, screeched “We are Malachai!” and jumped right into “Oh Mama/I’m in fear for my life/From the long arm of the law.” Only in Springfield!
After the wedding ship docks, at 10:00, we have reserved several booths at the back of Patrick’s Pub in Gilford. They have assured me that we can still order food if we’re hungry from the bar menu (their food is good). It’s a ten-minute drive from the Weirs normally, though Patrick’s is next door to Meadowbrook, so we may be fighting the Meadowbrook traffic coming the other way. I wonder if Styx will go to Patrick’s after the concert? Well, one thing is for sure: there will be a lot of Styx fans around, in case you are wondering what the people willing to shell out $80-$100 to see them look like.
So when you are on the Mount Washington on June 27, head up to the top deck at about 9 PM and listen really hard. You just might hear Styx, rocking out over the water.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Paradise Lost
Weirs Beach has enjoyed summer inhabitants since 8,000 BC, when Native Americans would fish on its shores, constructing baskets called weirs that trapped the shad as they migrated to the Merrimack River. By 10,000 BC, one tribe stayed year-round and claimed the area around the Weirs as their own. The legend of how the lake got its name involves a wedding. Apparently a Native American Chief, Wonaton, had a daughter, Mineola (like the orange!) who was in love with a chief from an enemy tribe. Wonaton was angry and tried to kill Adiwando, but Mineola shielded him from her father’s wrath. Mineola and Adiwando were married, and after the wedding, for some reason the tribe decided to travel by canoe to the middle of the lake. It had been a cloudy, overcast day, but at that time the sun emerged, and Wonaton saw that as a good omen, naming the lake Winnipesaukee, or “Smile of the Great Spirit.”
The train was the best thing to ever happen to Weirs Beach. The first tourists to the area started arriving in 1848, mostly due to the convenience of several trains moving through the area on the way to the White Mountains and Canada. At one point in the late 1800s, four trains stopped in the Weirs from Boston each day. The time between 1848 and 1910 is considered by many to be the heyday of the Weirs, when it was an upscale vacation resort. Gorgeous, elaborate hotels lined the seashore, and the Weirs Boardwalk was built, with a music hall pavilion called “Winnepesaukee Gardens”(which still stands today, as an arcade) restaurants, tea houses, and shops. It’s truly hard to imagine that the place that now sells $1 earrings, dreamcatchers, and boasts of motorcycle weekend as the premier event of the year was once one of the most upscale and elegant tourist destinations in New England, but it’s true.
The first steamship for tourists was the Lady of the Lake, which was launched in 1852. It essentially acted as a ferry, bringing tourists to the different ports around the lake, such as Wolfeboro and Center Harbor. It soon had competition: the original Mount Washington, launched on July 4, 1872. The Mount was faster, bigger, and more beautiful than the Lady of the Lake, and soon eclipsed the competition. In its prime, it transported as many as 60,000 tourists to various destinations around the lake. Cool fact: The Lady of the Lake served from 1897-99 as a floating hotel for workers building Kimball Castle in Gilford (see my previous post: “Castles Made of Sand”). Yes, that’s the haunted castle. In 1899 the owners sunk the Lady of the Lake in Glendale Cove, where it remains today.
The invention of the automobile changed everything, and not in a good way. Although tourists were still flocking to the area, many were not using the railroad, or the ferries, with as much frequency. In 1924, a fire burned down the largest of the luxury hotels (another, the Lakeview House, still stands, but it contains a sort of mini-mall with a pizza place and ice cream shop) and many other landmarks. The original Mount Washington also burned down in yet another fire in 1939. The Great Depression didn't help, either, and the "Golden Age" of the Weirs was over.
There wasn’t really a swimming beach at the Weirs until the 1950s, when it was re-imagined as an affordable family tourist destination; before that time, the shoreline was rocky and not amenable to swimming or sunbathing. A new Mount Washington was constructed in the 1940s, this one a longer, faster ship made of steel (the same one where the wedding will be held, but it has been refurbished and updated since then). When my parents were young, the Weirs was much more of a family spot than the teenage wasteland it was when I was in junior high and high school. Families still visit, but bike week is still a major attraction, as well the Loudon racetrack, so now you’re probably more bound to see people in their 40s and 50s acting like teenagers than you would actual adolescents, whose parents don't let them run free anymore (do they?). But the location is still beautiful, and when you’re there it really feels like summer vacation.
The train was the best thing to ever happen to Weirs Beach. The first tourists to the area started arriving in 1848, mostly due to the convenience of several trains moving through the area on the way to the White Mountains and Canada. At one point in the late 1800s, four trains stopped in the Weirs from Boston each day. The time between 1848 and 1910 is considered by many to be the heyday of the Weirs, when it was an upscale vacation resort. Gorgeous, elaborate hotels lined the seashore, and the Weirs Boardwalk was built, with a music hall pavilion called “Winnepesaukee Gardens”(which still stands today, as an arcade) restaurants, tea houses, and shops. It’s truly hard to imagine that the place that now sells $1 earrings, dreamcatchers, and boasts of motorcycle weekend as the premier event of the year was once one of the most upscale and elegant tourist destinations in New England, but it’s true.
The first steamship for tourists was the Lady of the Lake, which was launched in 1852. It essentially acted as a ferry, bringing tourists to the different ports around the lake, such as Wolfeboro and Center Harbor. It soon had competition: the original Mount Washington, launched on July 4, 1872. The Mount was faster, bigger, and more beautiful than the Lady of the Lake, and soon eclipsed the competition. In its prime, it transported as many as 60,000 tourists to various destinations around the lake. Cool fact: The Lady of the Lake served from 1897-99 as a floating hotel for workers building Kimball Castle in Gilford (see my previous post: “Castles Made of Sand”). Yes, that’s the haunted castle. In 1899 the owners sunk the Lady of the Lake in Glendale Cove, where it remains today.
The invention of the automobile changed everything, and not in a good way. Although tourists were still flocking to the area, many were not using the railroad, or the ferries, with as much frequency. In 1924, a fire burned down the largest of the luxury hotels (another, the Lakeview House, still stands, but it contains a sort of mini-mall with a pizza place and ice cream shop) and many other landmarks. The original Mount Washington also burned down in yet another fire in 1939. The Great Depression didn't help, either, and the "Golden Age" of the Weirs was over.
There wasn’t really a swimming beach at the Weirs until the 1950s, when it was re-imagined as an affordable family tourist destination; before that time, the shoreline was rocky and not amenable to swimming or sunbathing. A new Mount Washington was constructed in the 1940s, this one a longer, faster ship made of steel (the same one where the wedding will be held, but it has been refurbished and updated since then). When my parents were young, the Weirs was much more of a family spot than the teenage wasteland it was when I was in junior high and high school. Families still visit, but bike week is still a major attraction, as well the Loudon racetrack, so now you’re probably more bound to see people in their 40s and 50s acting like teenagers than you would actual adolescents, whose parents don't let them run free anymore (do they?). But the location is still beautiful, and when you’re there it really feels like summer vacation.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
The Emperor of Ice Cream
Whenever anyone asks me my favorite childhood memory, I usually share the story of my first time on a horse, or the summer when my parents put a pool in the backyard, or the time I spotted a live wire in a tree and saved the neighborhood from certain peril. This is because I’m aware of the gluttony inherent in my real best memory, which is the time the ice cream man’s truck broke down in front of our house. Even typing those words now gives me a thrill, because it was a chain of events so serendipitous as to lead to free ice cream for weeks and a story that my first-grade peers begged me to tell again and again. Our freezer housed casualties of the truck’s malfunctioning electrical system: rocketpops, root beer popsicles, those push-up sherbet things with the gumball at the bottom, the chocolate fudge pops with the real chocolate bar inside. And it was all ours!
There are three things people in New England can’t get enough of: the Red Sox, Dunkin Donuts Coffee, and ice cream. Per capita, New Englanders eat more ice cream than anyone else in the United States, a baffling statistic when one considers that we spend a third of the year covered in snow.
Because we love ice cream so much, we spend a lot of time debating who has the best ice cream, and the only kind that qualifies is homemade. Signs at candy shops and country stores will make sure to remind you that the ice cream is “our own” or “made on the premises.” There are at least two places within walking distance from the Weirs that offer homemade ice cream: JB Scoops and Kellerhaus. Kellerhaus is where we are getting the chocolate wedding favors, and their ice cream is good, but they are best known for their sundae bar with tons of toppings. Of course, they pile up the waffle bowls with ice cream so there’s not much room to fit toppings, but there are ways around this. They also turn the sundae bar into a waffle bar in the mornings. If a lunch item existed that could be topped with fudge, marshmallow, and blueberry sauce, you can bet that they would have a bar for that, too.
JB Scoops, which has a shop right in the Weirs and another in Meredith, has two flavors I count among my all-time favorites: cappuccino butter crunch and chocolate obscene, a dark, rich chocolate that I have enjoyed since high school. JB Scoops also still makes ice cream sodas: ice cream, soda water, chocolate syrup, sometimes a little milk, and whipped cream on top. If you’ve never tried one, they are a hundred times better than shakes, frappes, and malts, mostly because the kick of the fizzy water. Kind of like an egg cream with the chocolate and the carbonation.
Unfortunately, you will have to miss out on one of the best ice cream experiences in the area: Frankensundae. Elizabeth Hatmaker has always referred to this place as “The Frankensundae,” and it was an ice cream place with a picture of the Frankenstein monster on the sign. While I don’t remember the ice cream at Frankensundae being spectacular, it was right by the water and had good frappes and that my friends and I would stop drink down before going dancing at the nearby under 21 club, the Station. Alas, Frankensundae has gone the way of Aqua-net and John Hughes movies, and is now the more respectable “Franky’s,” an ice cream stand attached to the Town Docks restaurant.
Popular flavors in New England include Grape Nuts (yes, it has grape nuts cereal in it!), rum raisin, blueberry, maple walnut, birch bark (no, it does not have birch bark in it), and coffee, plus the ever-popular moose tracks (of which I fail to see the appeal). My dad swears by something called “frozen custard” or “frozen pudding” which I have discovered is just like ice cream but contains eggs. There's a place in Belmont (Jordan's) that sells ice cream sandwiches using warm, fresh-baked oatmeal cookies. For other sweet treats, try Chutter's candy store in Littleton, NH, which boasts the longest candy counter in the world (it's in Guiness book of world records!) or Winnipesaukee Chocolates in Wolfeboro (on the other side of the lake) which sells gourmet chocolate bars named after landmarks in the area. I really want to try these, actually--they won "Best chocolate in NH" in New Hampshire Magazine this year, and the bar wrappers are beautiful, too.
If I had to vote on the best ice cream in NH, I would have to say that it’s the kind made by the Sandwich Creamery. I have never actually been there, but my parents love it—they say it’s just a farm in the middle of nowhere where you can just pick up a quart and leave your money. What the Sandwich Creamery’s ice cream lacks in variety of flavors they make up for in pure deliciousness—it’s creamy but somehow light and fluffy. Sandwich only about a half hour, forty minutes from the Weirs, and its claim to fame the fact that in the center of town they have that direction sign from the introduction to Newhart (you know, the show with Larry, Darryl, and Darryl?) which my dad never fails to point out if you happen to be in the car with him on the way to Sandwich Creamery. He has even taken pictures of that sign.
There are three things people in New England can’t get enough of: the Red Sox, Dunkin Donuts Coffee, and ice cream. Per capita, New Englanders eat more ice cream than anyone else in the United States, a baffling statistic when one considers that we spend a third of the year covered in snow.
Because we love ice cream so much, we spend a lot of time debating who has the best ice cream, and the only kind that qualifies is homemade. Signs at candy shops and country stores will make sure to remind you that the ice cream is “our own” or “made on the premises.” There are at least two places within walking distance from the Weirs that offer homemade ice cream: JB Scoops and Kellerhaus. Kellerhaus is where we are getting the chocolate wedding favors, and their ice cream is good, but they are best known for their sundae bar with tons of toppings. Of course, they pile up the waffle bowls with ice cream so there’s not much room to fit toppings, but there are ways around this. They also turn the sundae bar into a waffle bar in the mornings. If a lunch item existed that could be topped with fudge, marshmallow, and blueberry sauce, you can bet that they would have a bar for that, too.
JB Scoops, which has a shop right in the Weirs and another in Meredith, has two flavors I count among my all-time favorites: cappuccino butter crunch and chocolate obscene, a dark, rich chocolate that I have enjoyed since high school. JB Scoops also still makes ice cream sodas: ice cream, soda water, chocolate syrup, sometimes a little milk, and whipped cream on top. If you’ve never tried one, they are a hundred times better than shakes, frappes, and malts, mostly because the kick of the fizzy water. Kind of like an egg cream with the chocolate and the carbonation.
Unfortunately, you will have to miss out on one of the best ice cream experiences in the area: Frankensundae. Elizabeth Hatmaker has always referred to this place as “The Frankensundae,” and it was an ice cream place with a picture of the Frankenstein monster on the sign. While I don’t remember the ice cream at Frankensundae being spectacular, it was right by the water and had good frappes and that my friends and I would stop drink down before going dancing at the nearby under 21 club, the Station. Alas, Frankensundae has gone the way of Aqua-net and John Hughes movies, and is now the more respectable “Franky’s,” an ice cream stand attached to the Town Docks restaurant.
Popular flavors in New England include Grape Nuts (yes, it has grape nuts cereal in it!), rum raisin, blueberry, maple walnut, birch bark (no, it does not have birch bark in it), and coffee, plus the ever-popular moose tracks (of which I fail to see the appeal). My dad swears by something called “frozen custard” or “frozen pudding” which I have discovered is just like ice cream but contains eggs. There's a place in Belmont (Jordan's) that sells ice cream sandwiches using warm, fresh-baked oatmeal cookies. For other sweet treats, try Chutter's candy store in Littleton, NH, which boasts the longest candy counter in the world (it's in Guiness book of world records!) or Winnipesaukee Chocolates in Wolfeboro (on the other side of the lake) which sells gourmet chocolate bars named after landmarks in the area. I really want to try these, actually--they won "Best chocolate in NH" in New Hampshire Magazine this year, and the bar wrappers are beautiful, too.
If I had to vote on the best ice cream in NH, I would have to say that it’s the kind made by the Sandwich Creamery. I have never actually been there, but my parents love it—they say it’s just a farm in the middle of nowhere where you can just pick up a quart and leave your money. What the Sandwich Creamery’s ice cream lacks in variety of flavors they make up for in pure deliciousness—it’s creamy but somehow light and fluffy. Sandwich only about a half hour, forty minutes from the Weirs, and its claim to fame the fact that in the center of town they have that direction sign from the introduction to Newhart (you know, the show with Larry, Darryl, and Darryl?) which my dad never fails to point out if you happen to be in the car with him on the way to Sandwich Creamery. He has even taken pictures of that sign.
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Freaks and Peaks
Weirs Beach is about 40 minutes away from the most picturesque and strange part of NH, the White Mountains. Although I like to think of the terrain where we live in Chesterfield as fairly mountainous, it has nothing on the Mt. Washington area, which is part of the Appalachian trail and has a lot to offer visitors, especially those who are not afraid of heights. The area is a geologist’s dream: Winnipesaukee itself is a glacial lake, and there are many caves and gorges. Unfortunately, our state landmark, the Old Man in the Mountain (a face-shaped rock formation on a peak in Franconia Notch ) crumbled three years ago today. But truth be told, there wasn’t much to do there except to say, “yup, looks like an old man,” so his demise should not deter anyone from visiting the area--there's still a lot to see.
Mt. Washington is the highest point in New England, with a summit at 6, 288 feet. It’s also the site of the “worst weather in the world” (a question I got right in trivia last year!) because the weather station at the summit recorded the highest winds on record: 231 MPH. The average mean wind speed is 35 MPH, with, according to the website, “hurricane force winds every third day.” More than 100 people have died on Mount Washington, mostly because of exposure to low temperatures (the wind chill has been recorded at -120 degrees Fahrenheit). They get 566 inches of snow on average annually.
The tourist activities in the White Mountains can be summed up in three words: trains, trams, and trained bears. Yes, there is hiking, biking, fishing, and all of that, but the hiking aspect of it is surprisingly underplayed in its advertising. What IS emphasized are all of the other ways you can get to the top without breaking a sweat. These include three trains that traverse the area, including the Cog Railway, which makes a 2 ½ hour round trip to the summit and back. You could also take one of three gondolas/trams, including the Aerial Tramway, a tram that seats 80 people (this makes me nervous just writing it) suspended by a cable, up to the 4200 ft. summit of Franconia Notch. You can also take your car up Mt. Washington. Driving around NH in the summer, you can often see bumper stickers reading “This Car Climbed Mt. Washington.” There’s an auto road designed just for this purpose. Just make sure your brakes are OK--they emphasize the importance of a functioning braking system. If you decide not to take your own car, they provide guided tours in what appears to be an airport van or, in winter, the Snow Coach.
Another activity for the adventurous set: mountain bike trails at Attitash (the same location as the Alpine Slide), bike trails that you need a ski lift to take you to, that go straight down a mountain (one trail is called “scrambled eggs.”) However, if risking your life is not your thing, you can rent a mountain bike and take some of the 12 miles of scenic bike trails on the “family friendly” route. This is a good place to add that northern NH in general embodies the "Live Free or Die" spirit of our state motto. Lots of interest in "extreme" activities (Bode Miller is a local hero here) and personal freedoms (Bode Miller's cousin was shot by a local vigilante after he--the cousin--shot and killed a police officer a few years back)and you will find some, uh, eccentrics among the locals, some of whom are not particularly friendly to tourists. Do not turn around in anyone's driveway if you make a wrong turn, is all I'm saying.
If you like caves, whether in a Freudian or academic way, you are in for a treat. There are three different cave parks in the area: Polar Caves, Lost River Gorge, and Flume Gorge. I have not been to any of these since grade school and I would love to go again. Both involve hiking, but on the way you get to see waterfalls inside of caves, pan for gold, gemstones, and fossils, and learn about rocks.
The only thing I clearly remember from childhood visits to the White Mountains was watching the trained bears at Clark’s Trading Post. Now, it’s kind of hard to describe Clark’s Trading Post. It’s kind of a museum, kind of an amusement park, kind of a freak show, kind of a gift shop/pitstop. It contains “The Mysterious Tuttle House,” a house that, according to Curious New England, “somehow breaks the laws of physics…everything is a little off-kilter.” And “Merlin’s Mystical Mansion,” which Curious New England describes this way:
Merlin, an eccentric magician, mesmerizes you in his dreamy
Victorian parlor until—zap—reality starts to shift, you feel
weightless,and—well—we won’t spoil the surprise. The ruse is
brilliant…using a combination of motors, computers, trompe
L’oeil, and sheer trickery.
The site contains this warning: If you suffer from claustrophobia, motion sickness, or epilepsy, or are afraid of the dark, you will not want to enter. Duly noted.
Clark’s also has a museum which houses animals with extra appendages (including a calf with two heads), antique typewriters, weaponry, and rare china. They also have two Mutoscopes, those very early film devices in which you put a penny in to see an animated picture, and one of them has a striptease show.
The trained bears swing on swings, play basketball, pretend to talk on the phone, and drive little cars. The site emphasizes that “no bears are forced to perform,” but I don’t know what that means. They have a talk with them beforehand, and if the bear says no he doesn’t go on stage?
If you are coming to the wedding and want to take a day trip to the White Mountains (if you can't tell from this, I highly recommend it), here is a map (see Weirs Beach at the very bottom?)
Mt. Washington is the highest point in New England, with a summit at 6, 288 feet. It’s also the site of the “worst weather in the world” (a question I got right in trivia last year!) because the weather station at the summit recorded the highest winds on record: 231 MPH. The average mean wind speed is 35 MPH, with, according to the website, “hurricane force winds every third day.” More than 100 people have died on Mount Washington, mostly because of exposure to low temperatures (the wind chill has been recorded at -120 degrees Fahrenheit). They get 566 inches of snow on average annually.
The tourist activities in the White Mountains can be summed up in three words: trains, trams, and trained bears. Yes, there is hiking, biking, fishing, and all of that, but the hiking aspect of it is surprisingly underplayed in its advertising. What IS emphasized are all of the other ways you can get to the top without breaking a sweat. These include three trains that traverse the area, including the Cog Railway, which makes a 2 ½ hour round trip to the summit and back. You could also take one of three gondolas/trams, including the Aerial Tramway, a tram that seats 80 people (this makes me nervous just writing it) suspended by a cable, up to the 4200 ft. summit of Franconia Notch. You can also take your car up Mt. Washington. Driving around NH in the summer, you can often see bumper stickers reading “This Car Climbed Mt. Washington.” There’s an auto road designed just for this purpose. Just make sure your brakes are OK--they emphasize the importance of a functioning braking system. If you decide not to take your own car, they provide guided tours in what appears to be an airport van or, in winter, the Snow Coach.
Another activity for the adventurous set: mountain bike trails at Attitash (the same location as the Alpine Slide), bike trails that you need a ski lift to take you to, that go straight down a mountain (one trail is called “scrambled eggs.”) However, if risking your life is not your thing, you can rent a mountain bike and take some of the 12 miles of scenic bike trails on the “family friendly” route. This is a good place to add that northern NH in general embodies the "Live Free or Die" spirit of our state motto. Lots of interest in "extreme" activities (Bode Miller is a local hero here) and personal freedoms (Bode Miller's cousin was shot by a local vigilante after he--the cousin--shot and killed a police officer a few years back)and you will find some, uh, eccentrics among the locals, some of whom are not particularly friendly to tourists. Do not turn around in anyone's driveway if you make a wrong turn, is all I'm saying.
If you like caves, whether in a Freudian or academic way, you are in for a treat. There are three different cave parks in the area: Polar Caves, Lost River Gorge, and Flume Gorge. I have not been to any of these since grade school and I would love to go again. Both involve hiking, but on the way you get to see waterfalls inside of caves, pan for gold, gemstones, and fossils, and learn about rocks.
The only thing I clearly remember from childhood visits to the White Mountains was watching the trained bears at Clark’s Trading Post. Now, it’s kind of hard to describe Clark’s Trading Post. It’s kind of a museum, kind of an amusement park, kind of a freak show, kind of a gift shop/pitstop. It contains “The Mysterious Tuttle House,” a house that, according to Curious New England, “somehow breaks the laws of physics…everything is a little off-kilter.” And “Merlin’s Mystical Mansion,” which Curious New England describes this way:
Merlin, an eccentric magician, mesmerizes you in his dreamy
Victorian parlor until—zap—reality starts to shift, you feel
weightless,and—well—we won’t spoil the surprise. The ruse is
brilliant…using a combination of motors, computers, trompe
L’oeil, and sheer trickery.
The site contains this warning: If you suffer from claustrophobia, motion sickness, or epilepsy, or are afraid of the dark, you will not want to enter. Duly noted.
Clark’s also has a museum which houses animals with extra appendages (including a calf with two heads), antique typewriters, weaponry, and rare china. They also have two Mutoscopes, those very early film devices in which you put a penny in to see an animated picture, and one of them has a striptease show.
The trained bears swing on swings, play basketball, pretend to talk on the phone, and drive little cars. The site emphasizes that “no bears are forced to perform,” but I don’t know what that means. They have a talk with them beforehand, and if the bear says no he doesn’t go on stage?
If you are coming to the wedding and want to take a day trip to the White Mountains (if you can't tell from this, I highly recommend it), here is a map (see Weirs Beach at the very bottom?)
Thursday, April 23, 2009
$2000 Rings and $26 Martinis
Well, I finally have my ring! And I found it at the first place we looked--Silverscape Design in Northampton.
It was kind of a strange day at first. We met our friend and Scott's co-worker, Wendy, at the Lauren Greenfield "Thin" and "Girl Culture" exhibit at the Smith museum. If you have never seen it and you have tendencies toward melancholia, don't. God, it was depressing--row after row of dead-eyed, prematurely old teenage girls and women with protruding bones staring out at you. There were a few examples of women who binged were obese as a result, but the focus was on the emaciated. Don't get me wrong, I support what Greenfield is doing, but there's not really much to say or debate after you see this exhibit. Reading the comments from the public was interesting, though--some truly boneheaded statements: "If they're stupid enough to do this to themselves, they deserve it," and "They just need to eat and stop doing this to their families!" I just do not understand how anyone viewing this exhibit could ever see an eating disorder as a choice.
After we saw the exhibit and some of the other pieces at the museum ( I love the top floor with all of the really old portrait paintings) we were faced with a dilemma. We were meeting up with Wendy's wife, Erin, for drinks and dinner, but we also had to shop for rings. I had found out that day that Scott had not told anyone at his work about the engagement, so we had to tell Erin and Wendy as we stood on the sidewalk across the street from the jewelry store. Then Scott took off for the record store (I can't blame him for that--there are great record stores in Noho) and Wendy and Erin went with me.
I actually wanted a ring kind of like Wendy's (white gold, simple but elegant, with a line of tiny diamonds) but those rings didn't look that great on my hand, and I tried on this one ring that looked like vines and loved it. Then I tried on a bunch more, and kept going back to the vine ring, so that's what I went with. I particularly liked that it was designed by a local artist from Amherst, Constance Gildea. By that time Scott had arrived and we bought the ring, and the saleslady was sort of taken aback that I gave her my credit/debit card to pay for it. I explained that it was a shared account (looking back, did I really owe her an explanation?) and Wendy's response was : "We never got asked that," and "What? This is Northampton!!"
Scott tried on a bunch of men's rings that were all around $2000, but he is determined to find one he likes for $200. He just might--with all that access to antique stores and such. As long as it fits and doesn't cut off circulation or turn his finger green, he's fine. But it sometimes takes as much as 6 weeks to size a ring, so he needs to get on it. We're going to try this place in Brattleboro (also next to a record store) that has tungsten rings for $125.
Afterward we went to a bar in an underground tunnel that has a martini that costs $26 (I realize that this is commonplace in cities, but come on!) and I had to endure the indignity of getting a martini off of the "easy does it" candy-flavored martini menu while everyone else ordered things like 12 year old scotch and "dirty" martinis with extra olives.
Speaking of scotch and martinis, we are now thinking about renting a function room on land for two hours after the ceremony/reception (so from 10:30-12:30) maybe at Patricks' Pub in Gilford, only a couple of miles from the boat and a straight drive along the water. I am also seriously considering wearing the pink dress to the Duluth reception and getting an ivory dress for the one in NH. I'll still go with tea length in both cases. I'm not even going to get started on shoes.
It was kind of a strange day at first. We met our friend and Scott's co-worker, Wendy, at the Lauren Greenfield "Thin" and "Girl Culture" exhibit at the Smith museum. If you have never seen it and you have tendencies toward melancholia, don't. God, it was depressing--row after row of dead-eyed, prematurely old teenage girls and women with protruding bones staring out at you. There were a few examples of women who binged were obese as a result, but the focus was on the emaciated. Don't get me wrong, I support what Greenfield is doing, but there's not really much to say or debate after you see this exhibit. Reading the comments from the public was interesting, though--some truly boneheaded statements: "If they're stupid enough to do this to themselves, they deserve it," and "They just need to eat and stop doing this to their families!" I just do not understand how anyone viewing this exhibit could ever see an eating disorder as a choice.
After we saw the exhibit and some of the other pieces at the museum ( I love the top floor with all of the really old portrait paintings) we were faced with a dilemma. We were meeting up with Wendy's wife, Erin, for drinks and dinner, but we also had to shop for rings. I had found out that day that Scott had not told anyone at his work about the engagement, so we had to tell Erin and Wendy as we stood on the sidewalk across the street from the jewelry store. Then Scott took off for the record store (I can't blame him for that--there are great record stores in Noho) and Wendy and Erin went with me.
I actually wanted a ring kind of like Wendy's (white gold, simple but elegant, with a line of tiny diamonds) but those rings didn't look that great on my hand, and I tried on this one ring that looked like vines and loved it. Then I tried on a bunch more, and kept going back to the vine ring, so that's what I went with. I particularly liked that it was designed by a local artist from Amherst, Constance Gildea. By that time Scott had arrived and we bought the ring, and the saleslady was sort of taken aback that I gave her my credit/debit card to pay for it. I explained that it was a shared account (looking back, did I really owe her an explanation?) and Wendy's response was : "We never got asked that," and "What? This is Northampton!!"
Scott tried on a bunch of men's rings that were all around $2000, but he is determined to find one he likes for $200. He just might--with all that access to antique stores and such. As long as it fits and doesn't cut off circulation or turn his finger green, he's fine. But it sometimes takes as much as 6 weeks to size a ring, so he needs to get on it. We're going to try this place in Brattleboro (also next to a record store) that has tungsten rings for $125.
Afterward we went to a bar in an underground tunnel that has a martini that costs $26 (I realize that this is commonplace in cities, but come on!) and I had to endure the indignity of getting a martini off of the "easy does it" candy-flavored martini menu while everyone else ordered things like 12 year old scotch and "dirty" martinis with extra olives.
Speaking of scotch and martinis, we are now thinking about renting a function room on land for two hours after the ceremony/reception (so from 10:30-12:30) maybe at Patricks' Pub in Gilford, only a couple of miles from the boat and a straight drive along the water. I am also seriously considering wearing the pink dress to the Duluth reception and getting an ivory dress for the one in NH. I'll still go with tea length in both cases. I'm not even going to get started on shoes.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
The Ring
Today is Easter, which means we drive two hours each way to Dracut, Massachusetts for a one and a half hour brunch at my Aunt Joanne's. It is worth it, though, because I get to see relatives I only see a few times a year, and Scott gets to eat real bacon.
I got to talk to my cousin Erin, who is something of a wedding expert. She got married nine years ago, in an extravaganza unlike anything my extended family has ever known, something so well-planned it was like a Broadway musical. She knows so much about weddings that I actually don't want to talk to her about the wedding, for fear there is something important I have neglected to arrange or consider. She knows all about place cards, the proper arrangement of centerpieces, bridal hosiery, and receiving line etiquette and placement. But she didn't select her ring, Jeff did, so she can't really help in that area.
I didn't find much by way of history, either. I did like the colonial American custom of giving a thimble as a symbol of an engagement and then cutting the top part off and using the bottom section as a wedding ring. It's thrifty, and cheap, even if the thimble does have a domestic connotation. I also liked how ancient Egyptians made their own rings out of plants, and the concept of the Middle Eastern "puzzle ring" that would collapse if the wearer took it off. On the whole, though, legends and stories about weddding rings and their origins repeat the same idea: that the ring finger was supposed to contain a vein in it that connected to the heart, and that the ring is a symbol of eternal love. The rings are even in the civil ceremony language, and on TV if a couple has no ring, they improvise--by borrowing someone else's, or using the tab top of a soda can. Is it even possible to be legally married if you don't have rings in the ceremony? Even the crazy weddings I found online had rings in the ceremony--the pirate wedding, the skydiver wedding, the Hello Kitty Wedding, and the Star Wars wedding, to name a few (see "Hello Kitty" men's ring, above. The poor guy blogs about his wife's total Hello Kitty obsession). I did enjoy the fact that one of the star wars weddings included a light saber fight between groom and best man, though.
Erin herself has a huge diamond engagement ring and wedding ring set. I have rarely in my life worn any rings at all, mostly because I have child-sized hands, sausage fingers, and bitten nails--I don't want to call attention to my hands by adorning them. Scott, who has really nice hands, used to wear a hipster-type ring back in grad school; one of us accidentally ran over it with the car and crushed it flat. He has not worn one since.
We have not purchased our rings yet, and we do not yet know what we want. Something simple, but something that we will want to wear every day. My mother offered me her original white gold engagement and wedding bands that she no longer wears, but I don't know how I feel about wearing a ring that was intended for her while she's around. For her tenth anniversary, my father bought her a brand new, engraved wedding ring that she loved, but that ring now rests in the murky deep of the bottom of Lake Winnipesaukee after she lost it sailing, years ago. We may well glide right over it on the Mount Washington.
I got to talk to my cousin Erin, who is something of a wedding expert. She got married nine years ago, in an extravaganza unlike anything my extended family has ever known, something so well-planned it was like a Broadway musical. She knows so much about weddings that I actually don't want to talk to her about the wedding, for fear there is something important I have neglected to arrange or consider. She knows all about place cards, the proper arrangement of centerpieces, bridal hosiery, and receiving line etiquette and placement. But she didn't select her ring, Jeff did, so she can't really help in that area.
I didn't find much by way of history, either. I did like the colonial American custom of giving a thimble as a symbol of an engagement and then cutting the top part off and using the bottom section as a wedding ring. It's thrifty, and cheap, even if the thimble does have a domestic connotation. I also liked how ancient Egyptians made their own rings out of plants, and the concept of the Middle Eastern "puzzle ring" that would collapse if the wearer took it off. On the whole, though, legends and stories about weddding rings and their origins repeat the same idea: that the ring finger was supposed to contain a vein in it that connected to the heart, and that the ring is a symbol of eternal love. The rings are even in the civil ceremony language, and on TV if a couple has no ring, they improvise--by borrowing someone else's, or using the tab top of a soda can. Is it even possible to be legally married if you don't have rings in the ceremony? Even the crazy weddings I found online had rings in the ceremony--the pirate wedding, the skydiver wedding, the Hello Kitty Wedding, and the Star Wars wedding, to name a few (see "Hello Kitty" men's ring, above. The poor guy blogs about his wife's total Hello Kitty obsession). I did enjoy the fact that one of the star wars weddings included a light saber fight between groom and best man, though.
Erin herself has a huge diamond engagement ring and wedding ring set. I have rarely in my life worn any rings at all, mostly because I have child-sized hands, sausage fingers, and bitten nails--I don't want to call attention to my hands by adorning them. Scott, who has really nice hands, used to wear a hipster-type ring back in grad school; one of us accidentally ran over it with the car and crushed it flat. He has not worn one since.
We have not purchased our rings yet, and we do not yet know what we want. Something simple, but something that we will want to wear every day. My mother offered me her original white gold engagement and wedding bands that she no longer wears, but I don't know how I feel about wearing a ring that was intended for her while she's around. For her tenth anniversary, my father bought her a brand new, engraved wedding ring that she loved, but that ring now rests in the murky deep of the bottom of Lake Winnipesaukee after she lost it sailing, years ago. We may well glide right over it on the Mount Washington.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
The Mummy Returns
The first time I wore a wedding gown was in college, where I went to my friend Amy's class to be a "live mannequin" for a presentation she was doing. I don't really recall what kind of class would have students do something like this, but Amy was interested in the wedding industry. Since I did not consume food during my entire junior year of college (only a slight exaggeration), I was the only one willing to do this who could fit into a size 2, so I agreed to it. It was 1989, so the dress was truly craptacular--big shoulders, fitted, mermaid skirt, weird, collar-like neckline and smothered with beading and lace. It was heavy and hard to walk, in, too; I had to take little steps. I could not figure out how anyone could walk down an aisle in such a dress, let alone attend a party--I was like a mummy, all bones and shrouded in lace. All the girls in our dorm came downstairs to admire my finery, and everyone seemed to think it was beautiful, but I was definitely not one of those girls. It was a Catholic women's college; we even had nuns living in our building, and a lot of my friends got married during or right after college, yet I could more readily see myself going into outer space than getting married.
I remembered this when we met with the wedding organizer for the Mount Washington this past weekend. Although she seemed really fine with anything we wanted, and repeated "it's about what you want" several times, she still insisted on the idea that I need to make some sort of grand entrance and not see Scott until the ceremony. She also told us a story of how one groom stepped on the bride's long dress only to have it completely rip down the back. Then the bride punched him.
It is even harder than I expected to explain why I find some wedding rituals not only unecessary, but ridiculous, in ways that have little to do with my age. I have also been stumped many times by the question, "What are the wedding colors?" I just don't get the impulse to match everything (too "matchy matchy" as Heidi Klum would say)--as long as you don't have anything like fuschia or periwinkle, most colors go together pretty well. I do appreciate those who flout convention and do really over-the-top things, things, though, like the bride (see picture at left) who wanted a cake that looked just like her. She was roundly criticized online, but I think the haters need to step back and admire her chutzpah.
Most of the people we met with about the wedding have been pretty laid back, though. The baker actually seemed too mellow--he kept getting the information wrong (August 15th, right? At the VFW hall? And you're Mandy?), and it wasn't really a "cake tasting" as the Knot explains it; I tried a couple of sample of cupcakes with frosting (it was chocolate or vanilla--no cherry fillings or hazelnut cream,as the Knot promised--but it was really delicious. The frosting was really light and fluffy and not too sweet, and the vanilla cupcakes were also airy but had a kind of sweet crunchiness on the top. He agreed to the whole strawberries, and we'll have some kind of flower on top. Karen, who is doing the flowers, is thinking about rose petals. BTW, she does not spray her roses, so no fear of pesticide poisoning.
The wedding favors will be from Kellerhaus, which is that faux-Austrian ice-cream and candy shop near where a lot of you will be staying. I wanted to go with chocolates, but I didn't like the wedding theme decorations for the boxes (swans, hearts, cupids, those naked "Love Is" children) so they let me pick an anchor. Later, Scott questioned the symbol of the anchor (do you want an anchor right under your name?) but I wanted something nautical. And anchors can be good things--it's not as though I chose a picture of a brick with a rope tied to it.
The reception hall in the boat is on the lowest level, and there are no windows. Don't worry if you tend toward seasickness--the boat was on the water and there was no movement at all that I could discern, and the lake only gets slightly choppy at times (and that can be felt only minimally). If you are nervous about this, try sea bands--they are effective on the water. I wouldn't recommend Dramamine if you are even going to have one drink. I almost passed out visiting Scott in Michigan once when I had half a glass of wine after Dramamine. We won't spend that much time in our reception hall anyway--after food and cake, we can lounge by the water and watch the NASCAR dads and retirees from Connecticut dance the electric slide, all ceremonial details complete.
I remembered this when we met with the wedding organizer for the Mount Washington this past weekend. Although she seemed really fine with anything we wanted, and repeated "it's about what you want" several times, she still insisted on the idea that I need to make some sort of grand entrance and not see Scott until the ceremony. She also told us a story of how one groom stepped on the bride's long dress only to have it completely rip down the back. Then the bride punched him.
It is even harder than I expected to explain why I find some wedding rituals not only unecessary, but ridiculous, in ways that have little to do with my age. I have also been stumped many times by the question, "What are the wedding colors?" I just don't get the impulse to match everything (too "matchy matchy" as Heidi Klum would say)--as long as you don't have anything like fuschia or periwinkle, most colors go together pretty well. I do appreciate those who flout convention and do really over-the-top things, things, though, like the bride (see picture at left) who wanted a cake that looked just like her. She was roundly criticized online, but I think the haters need to step back and admire her chutzpah.
Most of the people we met with about the wedding have been pretty laid back, though. The baker actually seemed too mellow--he kept getting the information wrong (August 15th, right? At the VFW hall? And you're Mandy?), and it wasn't really a "cake tasting" as the Knot explains it; I tried a couple of sample of cupcakes with frosting (it was chocolate or vanilla--no cherry fillings or hazelnut cream,as the Knot promised--but it was really delicious. The frosting was really light and fluffy and not too sweet, and the vanilla cupcakes were also airy but had a kind of sweet crunchiness on the top. He agreed to the whole strawberries, and we'll have some kind of flower on top. Karen, who is doing the flowers, is thinking about rose petals. BTW, she does not spray her roses, so no fear of pesticide poisoning.
The wedding favors will be from Kellerhaus, which is that faux-Austrian ice-cream and candy shop near where a lot of you will be staying. I wanted to go with chocolates, but I didn't like the wedding theme decorations for the boxes (swans, hearts, cupids, those naked "Love Is" children) so they let me pick an anchor. Later, Scott questioned the symbol of the anchor (do you want an anchor right under your name?) but I wanted something nautical. And anchors can be good things--it's not as though I chose a picture of a brick with a rope tied to it.
The reception hall in the boat is on the lowest level, and there are no windows. Don't worry if you tend toward seasickness--the boat was on the water and there was no movement at all that I could discern, and the lake only gets slightly choppy at times (and that can be felt only minimally). If you are nervous about this, try sea bands--they are effective on the water. I wouldn't recommend Dramamine if you are even going to have one drink. I almost passed out visiting Scott in Michigan once when I had half a glass of wine after Dramamine. We won't spend that much time in our reception hall anyway--after food and cake, we can lounge by the water and watch the NASCAR dads and retirees from Connecticut dance the electric slide, all ceremonial details complete.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Wedding Crashers
In Rebecca Mead’s book One Perfect Day, she points out how the wedding industry sells the concept of tradition, in suggesting that the bride and groom “create their own traditions” by “customizing” their ceremonies. What it means is that couples can congratulate themselves for having a traditional wedding, but can also put their own spin on the proceedings. For example, instead of having a flower girl, couples can combine their love of sea turtles with their love of scrapbooking by having a sea turtle transport their beribboned scrapbook down the aisle to kick off the ceremony.
I am all in favor of this, by the way, and I think couples should make their own decisions about their wedding ceremonies. But don’t call it “tradition.” Isn’t a tradition, by definition, something that you don’t create but follow? And is “traditional” a good thing? (consider how the term “traditional marriage” is often used, and who uses it). Even the roots of some of the most benign-seeming wedding traditions are either more sexist than I had even thought, or just so strange I don’t know why we still observe them. Here are just a few that I found:
The bridesmaids and ushers dressed similarly? They are there to fool evil spirits or exes by dressing just like the bride and groom and confusing them. OK, maybe some of my exes would be fooled by someone dressed like me (apologies to any of you reading this), but Scott’s exes would not fall for that. Which begs the larger question: is it fair to lump them in with evil spirits?
The bride usually stands on the left so that the groom’s right hand would be free for swordplay should he be challenged to a duel by a rival at the altar.
The groom is not allowed to see the bride before the wedding because, in arranged marriages, he might back out beforehand if she’s not attractive enough. This tradition lives on: the wedding coordinator on the Mount Washington tried to talk me into changing into my dress in the dressing room on the boat (my thought, also: a dressing room on a boat?) but I declined.
The bouquet is thrown because at one time, wedding guests would pull and tear at the gown of the bride to gain some of her good fortune, sort of the way the zombies did in Night of the Living Dead. To distract them, she threw them the flowers. Then probably a lamp, her shoes, the groom...
The “something old/something blue” tradition is supposed to ward off evil spirits, too. However, the “something borrowed” is supposed to be from a happily married woman, so she can pass her luck in marriage to the bride. I am wearing the necklace of my dearly departed, thrice-widowed (before the age of fifty)Nana. She did have great luck in card games, though—maybe I will inherit that.
The original Roman tradition of cutting the wedding cake went something like this: the groom broke the cake over the bride’s head to symbolize fertility. And this was no soft buttercream confection, either--it was a denser, non-sweet cake made of barley. Why that symbolizes fertility, I have no idea.
Bouquets were originally made of herbs like thyme and garlic and were meant to ward off evil spirits, the original wedding crashers.
One wedding ritual that I think Scott would like is an Italian tradition called “sawhorsing.” While this sounds wildly inappropriate, bear with me. Basically, the bride and groom march to the center of town with a double-handled hacksaw. To the cheering of onlookers, they saw through the log until it is cut in half, symbolizing the teamwork of marriage. Scott likes using saws and always has use for some cut lumber, and I accept any opportunity to tone my arms, so this might be a tradition worth preserving.
We have a long list of traditions that we will be avoiding at our wedding: No unity candle (we were expressly permitted from having “flaming materials” in our function room on the boat, but that’s not the reason: I just don’t like them. Did you know that this did not even originate in any church, but was dreamed up by the wedding industry?). No bridesmaids or ushers. No processional. No bouquet throwing. No cake smashing. No champagne toast. No receiving line. Yes, we are leaving ourselves open targets for myopic exes, evil spirits, and jealous rivals with swords, but it’s a risk we’re willing to take.
I am all in favor of this, by the way, and I think couples should make their own decisions about their wedding ceremonies. But don’t call it “tradition.” Isn’t a tradition, by definition, something that you don’t create but follow? And is “traditional” a good thing? (consider how the term “traditional marriage” is often used, and who uses it). Even the roots of some of the most benign-seeming wedding traditions are either more sexist than I had even thought, or just so strange I don’t know why we still observe them. Here are just a few that I found:
The bridesmaids and ushers dressed similarly? They are there to fool evil spirits or exes by dressing just like the bride and groom and confusing them. OK, maybe some of my exes would be fooled by someone dressed like me (apologies to any of you reading this), but Scott’s exes would not fall for that. Which begs the larger question: is it fair to lump them in with evil spirits?
The bride usually stands on the left so that the groom’s right hand would be free for swordplay should he be challenged to a duel by a rival at the altar.
The groom is not allowed to see the bride before the wedding because, in arranged marriages, he might back out beforehand if she’s not attractive enough. This tradition lives on: the wedding coordinator on the Mount Washington tried to talk me into changing into my dress in the dressing room on the boat (my thought, also: a dressing room on a boat?) but I declined.
The bouquet is thrown because at one time, wedding guests would pull and tear at the gown of the bride to gain some of her good fortune, sort of the way the zombies did in Night of the Living Dead. To distract them, she threw them the flowers. Then probably a lamp, her shoes, the groom...
The “something old/something blue” tradition is supposed to ward off evil spirits, too. However, the “something borrowed” is supposed to be from a happily married woman, so she can pass her luck in marriage to the bride. I am wearing the necklace of my dearly departed, thrice-widowed (before the age of fifty)Nana. She did have great luck in card games, though—maybe I will inherit that.
The original Roman tradition of cutting the wedding cake went something like this: the groom broke the cake over the bride’s head to symbolize fertility. And this was no soft buttercream confection, either--it was a denser, non-sweet cake made of barley. Why that symbolizes fertility, I have no idea.
Bouquets were originally made of herbs like thyme and garlic and were meant to ward off evil spirits, the original wedding crashers.
One wedding ritual that I think Scott would like is an Italian tradition called “sawhorsing.” While this sounds wildly inappropriate, bear with me. Basically, the bride and groom march to the center of town with a double-handled hacksaw. To the cheering of onlookers, they saw through the log until it is cut in half, symbolizing the teamwork of marriage. Scott likes using saws and always has use for some cut lumber, and I accept any opportunity to tone my arms, so this might be a tradition worth preserving.
We have a long list of traditions that we will be avoiding at our wedding: No unity candle (we were expressly permitted from having “flaming materials” in our function room on the boat, but that’s not the reason: I just don’t like them. Did you know that this did not even originate in any church, but was dreamed up by the wedding industry?). No bridesmaids or ushers. No processional. No bouquet throwing. No cake smashing. No champagne toast. No receiving line. Yes, we are leaving ourselves open targets for myopic exes, evil spirits, and jealous rivals with swords, but it’s a risk we’re willing to take.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Weddiquette, or Brides, Quit Swinging your Arms Like Ropes Already
The most beautiful wedding ever imagined could be turned from sacrament to circus by the indecorous behavior of the groom and the flippancy of the bride. Emily Post, Etiquette, 1927
As many of you know, the Kirsti half of Scott and Kirsti is now on Facebook, which means that I am frittering my time away on 60-character posts (which is great fun, by the way). Many of my FB postings lately have been about reading a very old copy of Emily Post’s Etiquette that I got for two dollars at an antique store while Scott was rifling through piles of dusty records. I have unearthed a lot of good stuff this way: wooden bowls, a garnet bracelet, Tricia Nixon paper dolls. I even found this disturbing but fascinating old book titled Medical Curiosities, written in the late nineteeth century, in which them medical term for conjoined twins was “double monsters” and lycanthropy was the diagnosis if you were unusually hairy. My pharmacist brother, Karl, really wanted that book, and when he had to move back east after Hurricane Katrina I gave it to him, so I can’t provide any more tidbits from that particular text. However, my point is that I love old, weird books, and this connects to our wedding because my Emily Post book devotes several entire chapters to wedding etiquette. And she is one odd lady, truly obsessed, at least back then, with turning everyone into what she labels "People of Quality."
I need to tell you up front that I waited to research current wedding etiquette after I sent out a good portion of the invitations, which, according to Emily Post, were sent out sixteen weeks too early, without guests’ names on the response cards. Current Emily Post also says that we must have an open bar at our wedding, because guests are not supposed to pay for anything at the wedding, but the boat does not allow open bar. Two strikes right there!
If we go by the 1920s version of Etiquette, we have already broken pretty much every single rule she lays out. First, the oldest possible age Emily Post can imagine for a bride is thirty (she has a whole section called “In Bridal Dress at Thirty” as if it’s something one finds herself in by accident, after a bender) and she stresses how crucial it is for the “Early Autumn” bride to wear “a tint of rose-beige” to flatter her aging complexion.
The closest I can come in this book to anything that would be anywhere applicable to our wedding would be “the second marriage,” even though neither of us has been married before. This section focuses on “The spinster’s wedding” and this means no bridal veil, orange blossoms, nor myrtle wreath and bridesmaids. The garland is an even bigger deal than the white dress, surprisingly—Post says that the garland is a “coronet of chastity and the bride’s right to wear it was her inalienable attribute of virtue.” No problem, because I think the tiara is the new garland--and the only myrtle wreaths I found online were for front doors.
The rules are a little different for a widow, who can’t be given away by her father because she has already been given away once. Apparently, she is not able to be "given back." Post believes that widows should be as low-key as possible, and there’s more than a hint that she finds second weddings—even those of widows—distasteful. Post recommends a “traveling dress” or “afternoon street dress and hat in any color” except white for the attire. She stresses that there ought not to be “ribboned-off seats” and only “the simplest afternoon tea" at such weddings.
Post is very much bothered by brides who have personalities or senses of humor. For example, she lists some things that a bride should never do:
She must not reach up and wigwag signals while she is receiving, any more than she must wave to people as she goes up and down the aisle of the church. She must not cling to her husband as though unable to stand, or lean against him or the wall, or any person or thing. She must not swing her arms as though they were dangling ropes. She must not switch
herself this way and that, and she must not shout; and above all, she must not, while wearing her bridal veil, smoke a cigarette.
The bride in this scenario does not sound remiss about the finer points of etiquette, but really drunk. Now, I might understand Ms. Post’s aversion to this behavior if she disapproved of drinking, but she actually finds abstainers a bit whiny and inconvenient. In her world, after a fancy dinner, women drink liqueur “from a tray of little glasses” and retreat to the parlor, and the men
…Alone, remain seated at table, drinking their fine cognac and smoking cigars and eating unsalted nuts.
At our wedding, we hope everyone enjoys as many unsalted nuts as they want, regardless of gender.
As many of you know, the Kirsti half of Scott and Kirsti is now on Facebook, which means that I am frittering my time away on 60-character posts (which is great fun, by the way). Many of my FB postings lately have been about reading a very old copy of Emily Post’s Etiquette that I got for two dollars at an antique store while Scott was rifling through piles of dusty records. I have unearthed a lot of good stuff this way: wooden bowls, a garnet bracelet, Tricia Nixon paper dolls. I even found this disturbing but fascinating old book titled Medical Curiosities, written in the late nineteeth century, in which them medical term for conjoined twins was “double monsters” and lycanthropy was the diagnosis if you were unusually hairy. My pharmacist brother, Karl, really wanted that book, and when he had to move back east after Hurricane Katrina I gave it to him, so I can’t provide any more tidbits from that particular text. However, my point is that I love old, weird books, and this connects to our wedding because my Emily Post book devotes several entire chapters to wedding etiquette. And she is one odd lady, truly obsessed, at least back then, with turning everyone into what she labels "People of Quality."
I need to tell you up front that I waited to research current wedding etiquette after I sent out a good portion of the invitations, which, according to Emily Post, were sent out sixteen weeks too early, without guests’ names on the response cards. Current Emily Post also says that we must have an open bar at our wedding, because guests are not supposed to pay for anything at the wedding, but the boat does not allow open bar. Two strikes right there!
If we go by the 1920s version of Etiquette, we have already broken pretty much every single rule she lays out. First, the oldest possible age Emily Post can imagine for a bride is thirty (she has a whole section called “In Bridal Dress at Thirty” as if it’s something one finds herself in by accident, after a bender) and she stresses how crucial it is for the “Early Autumn” bride to wear “a tint of rose-beige” to flatter her aging complexion.
The closest I can come in this book to anything that would be anywhere applicable to our wedding would be “the second marriage,” even though neither of us has been married before. This section focuses on “The spinster’s wedding” and this means no bridal veil, orange blossoms, nor myrtle wreath and bridesmaids. The garland is an even bigger deal than the white dress, surprisingly—Post says that the garland is a “coronet of chastity and the bride’s right to wear it was her inalienable attribute of virtue.” No problem, because I think the tiara is the new garland--and the only myrtle wreaths I found online were for front doors.
The rules are a little different for a widow, who can’t be given away by her father because she has already been given away once. Apparently, she is not able to be "given back." Post believes that widows should be as low-key as possible, and there’s more than a hint that she finds second weddings—even those of widows—distasteful. Post recommends a “traveling dress” or “afternoon street dress and hat in any color” except white for the attire. She stresses that there ought not to be “ribboned-off seats” and only “the simplest afternoon tea" at such weddings.
Post is very much bothered by brides who have personalities or senses of humor. For example, she lists some things that a bride should never do:
She must not reach up and wigwag signals while she is receiving, any more than she must wave to people as she goes up and down the aisle of the church. She must not cling to her husband as though unable to stand, or lean against him or the wall, or any person or thing. She must not swing her arms as though they were dangling ropes. She must not switch
herself this way and that, and she must not shout; and above all, she must not, while wearing her bridal veil, smoke a cigarette.
The bride in this scenario does not sound remiss about the finer points of etiquette, but really drunk. Now, I might understand Ms. Post’s aversion to this behavior if she disapproved of drinking, but she actually finds abstainers a bit whiny and inconvenient. In her world, after a fancy dinner, women drink liqueur “from a tray of little glasses” and retreat to the parlor, and the men
…Alone, remain seated at table, drinking their fine cognac and smoking cigars and eating unsalted nuts.
At our wedding, we hope everyone enjoys as many unsalted nuts as they want, regardless of gender.
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