One Line Poem

A hint of warmth in your coffee cup reminds me how recently you were here.

Japan–1990

Thoughts on Edward Gorey

Today I am interested in Edward Gorey. He makes me think of so many things, and yet we never came near to meeting. He departed this life about ten years ago now, so meeting him anytime soon is unlikely. In his artwork, unmistakable even to those who are unfamiliar with the man himself, he flirts deliciously with the macabre. But it's okay. You always know which side of the dark whispery curtain is yours . . . for the time being.

My first experience of Gorey was as a child. My mother loved to watch the PBS series Mystery! My sisters and I would sometimes watch with her, though we most often watched the beginning of the program just so we could giggle and imitate the characters in the opening titles. To this day, the subject of Gorey's artwork will occasionally come up and we reminisce, though more with a chuckle now than a giggle now that we are adults. 

A very good friend who has also since left us once gave my eldest daughter a little booklet. It was the abecedarian book called The Gashlycrumb Tinies. Each leaf of the small book features a boy or a girl whose name began with a particular letter of the alphabet, and each of the small children meets gruesome or grizzly end, and the really awful thing is that you can't help but laugh, at least at some of them. Each in a single frame, they expire alphabetically, and they expire in rhyme. You do not see the child's actual demise in most cases, but it is the implication of what comes next that produces the chuckle.

Now, I know the reality is not funny at all, but like the child who loves monster, dinosaur, and ghost stories, which help to relieve some of the anxiety of the unknown in their little lives, I appreciate Gorey's taking the edge off the reality of human child mortality in mine. Think of it as a sort of psychological homeopathy, if you will. We fight like with like. The constant fear of losing one's little ones—undeniably real in our world, just open a newspaper—requires, for me at least, the occasional off-letting of steam, and humor, in this case, is the medium. After all, life is too serious to live it without a sense of humor.

Writer's Block and Desperate Dough

Desperately hoping something deadly witty will pop into my head before my four-year-old comes into the room needing me to settle a four-year-old's problems, but the suspense of waiting for the little pad, pad, pad of the feet is killing me with writer's block . . . 

Update on King Arthur . . . I began the book over again after only reading the first four chapters. Lo and behold, my eight-year old requested that we read it together! I'll read a few lines and translate the archaic English into contemporary English. Slow-going, but I'm thrilled she wants to do it.

This afternoon I used my new KitchenAid mixer to make focaccia dough. It's a relatively small model machine, though I had no qualms about using it for this particular recipe until the dough began overpowering the dough hook in a near coup that almost took place during the kneading process. I came to the machine's rescue and together we subdued the dough with olive oil in a wooden salad bowl and stuffed into the back of the refrigerator to be dealt with tomorrow. We'll see how it turns out.

Ah, what to do with a beautiful, overcast Saturday morning. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways . . .

Today there is no breakfast date with my husband. You see, we have lately developed a loverly little custom of getting up almost before the sun (it is May, after all) and dashing out for a quiet breakfast and coffee before much of the Saturday world is awake. There are a few places nearby that are open round the clock, so we never have to wait outside for the doors to open, the coffee is ready and fresh, and the atmosphere is very inviting.

My husband never fails to take the Saturday edition of the Financial Times, and we pretend for a little while that we are college students without a care in the world. Excluding a quantity of children sleeping back in their cozy little beds at home, of course. Don't worry, two of the them are veteran babysitters.

Not so this morning. We'll put the coffee on here, pull out the newspaper at the table and still pretend that we have not a care in the world. But on this Saturday, we'll make the most of the early quiet hours, or minutes, at home.

Stacy's Coffee Parlor

Finding a place to sit and read or write, where you can get a good tea or coffee and decent atmosphere, and that doesn't begin with an "St" and end with a "ks"is no easy task. I have nothing against those coffee shop chains, but I do think there's room for variety here.

In Japan, for instance, you can pop into any Doutor or Excelsior Caffe shop (or a slew of others, all owned by Doutor Coffee Co., Ltd.:  www.doutor.co.jp/en), and find many different offerings of food as well as beverages. Each shop has its own character, its own brand of refreshment, and they, like SB, are ubiquitous, so you can go wherever your palate takes you.

From what I hear, even the coffee shop launched by McDonald's (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCafé) does brisk business in other countries. Apparently, though, McD's only offered the drink, not the full coffee shop, here in the U.S. I personally think that is a mistake. When I want a coffee somewhere other than home, I do not think of the Golden Arches when flipping through my mental rolodex. Maybe I should, but I don't.

At any rate, today was a "find a quiet place to sit and sip day".

In Falls Church, VA, there is a stretch of Route 7 that is congested with store fronts, strip malls, hidden nooks and crannies, and, as in many cities and quaintified small towns (no, I know quaintified isn't a word, I just made it up) it is best to be in a passenger seat if you really want to see even half of what's there. Today, I was in the driver's seat. Don't worry, this isn't an accident report.

No, my car was mysteriously guided by unseen forces to a tiny, barely visible, if-you-blink-you'll-miss-it shop with a small parking lot, the only kind they make in small towns in NoVA. Lo and behold, the lot was half empty—a good thing when it comes to parking lots and in-boxes. I pulled into the open space with no difficulty whatsoever, and proceeded to walk toward the shop.

Now, the signage on the exterior of the building was promising. It is kitschy 1950's retro. Stacy's Coffee Parlor, it's called. I got a little nervous as I approached the entrance, thinking, "What if this is a real dud? What if I've misjudged this book by it's cover? Do I grab my coffee and go? Go where? The whole point of this exercise was to find a place to sit and stay a while. Oy."

My fears were allayed as soon as I entered, however, at least on the atmosphere part. Once inside, I could see that not only was the front door open, but the door way at the back of the long, narrow room was open as well, inviting a lovely spring cross breeze. In the front of the shop were two cozy seating areas, the one in the window was an airy pastel set of wicker and iron garden furniture with cushions, the other, just behind it, a soft, neutral sofa set with two small, leather arm chairs.

In the middle was an area with many small, round, two-seater tables just right for a coffee date, and in the back was another seating area with sofas and a shelf of books and magazines, just right for an intimate group to discuss politics, language, literature, film, whatever. It apparently serves as a good spot for moms and little people out for a sociable morning as well as a local live acoustic music spot some evenings.

What I forgot to mention in the muddle of all this description is that I also wanted something to eat that was neither sweet nor stupendously high in calories, and Stacy's specialty, aside from the coffees and teas, is advertised as ice cream and bakery items. Oops.

This turned out not to be a problem, either. Though there were not many savory items on the menu, there were enough to meet my requirements. Mission Accomplished.

The little coffee shop was quiet enough for reading and writing, and I found an alternative to the noisy big guys in this little corner of the big, big world. I would recommend giving it a try if you're passing through town. It's on my ever-evolving list of favorites.

Plastic School Cafeteria Lunch Punch Cards

Where to begin? I don't like them.

Yes, they make life convenient, particularly for the cafeteria workers. And busy parents. And the children themselves, for that matter. But as with most things, I find there is a price to pay for convenience.

It's not a tax, or tip, or a service fee you pay for the privilege of using the little plastic card. It's not a minimum balance, and it's not a loss of value if you don't use full amount by a given deadline.

No, the price is much greater than any of the above.

Most of the time, my child takes her lunch to school. This is a policy in my house. I'm hoping she will learn that she can have a very good lunch every day without having to pay someone else to make it for her (disclaimer: she's in second grade, so I'm the one preparing it for now.). 

I do want for her to have the school lunch occasionally, however, so there are days when she needs to buy it. Here is where my next policy comes in. She has to pay cash for it. Cold, hard, dirty, wrinkly, labor-intensive cash. The greenbacks and coins. 

Yes, I've been questioned about this practice by well-meaning parents who look at me as if I'm just a little bit crazy for not putting my daughter on the Plastic Card Plan. After all, it is soooo much more convenient. And I will admit that there are days when I scramble for lunch money or when my daughter's little change purse or wallet are nowhere to be found. And still I insist. But why?

I'm no rocket scientist. I'm not even that great at math. But I am generally a logical and reasonable person, and I do attempt to follow that line of thinking known as "common sense". My eyeballs have been known to hit a newspaper or website from time to time, and it seems fairly obvious to me that our plastic card mentality has not done us any favors. Personal debt is a tremendous problem in our country, and considering that so many of us grew up handling actual money, what can we expect for our children if they don't even know what it looks like?

Walk with me here. The child selects lunch items, which are placed on a tray; said tray is delivered to said child, who advances to the head of the line where the lunch lady is waiting. The child hands over the card, which is swiped and handed directly back to the child, who then returns the card to a pocket or wallet. Where is the sense of transaction in that? The child gives up nothing and yet receives lunch all the same. At least with old-fashioned cash, the child must give it up permanently. He or she learns that there is a cost involved and that the money just given up will never see the inside of his or her wallet again. Nor will that same money later be available to use for a different purchase.

Not so with the card. The card is the "gift that keeps on giving." Any time the child wants lunch, ice cream, seconds, or whatever, the card comes out and takes care of everything. Hmmm. It sounds  to me like we're contributing to the financial delinquency of minors. If this is the message we are sending our children in early elementary school, we should not be at all surprised when they have no idea how to handle money or finances when they are older. It is well known that the only way to learn a language (or any other skill for that matter) is regularly and frequently to practice it. What, then, is the expected outcome if our children regularly and frequently use the plastic card?

To loosely borrow and abbreviate a quote from Booker T. Washington, "Nothing worth having ever comes easily." So I will continue to scour the furniture for loose change and ask cashiers for my twenty dollars cash back in the form of one dollar bills, and my daughter will just have to make sure she remembers where she put that little wallet. Show me the money. 

Buttercups

Round, yellow buttercups are resting in a short, square vase outside on the table on the deck. I had no idea those weedy little gems of childhood glee were such sturdy little things. It took my four-year-old's curious and eager little mind and hands to make the first bouquet, which has lasted several days now. Who knew?

Most of the time there is a nebulous 30% of my brain and heart that detests living in such a congested area—that would be on the Virginia side of D.C.—but even here there are those small delights, so fleeting that the blink of an eye feels like too much time to waste on the mundane world. Buttercups are one of them.

There is a field across the street from where we live. It is a public park where the tiny U5's play at soccer in their pink, green, yellow, orange, blue, or some-other-color-of-the-rainbow jerseys—jerseys that swallow some of them down to their little knees only to end in shin-guard–packed black socks and cleats. On a few occasions, I have seen a group of men between the ages of, oh, let's say 20 and 35 out there engaging in some serious soccer scrimmage. And every morning and afternoon, dog-walkers and a steady stream of high schoolers wend their way across the field on a mission—the high schoolers to make it to school before the last bell and, afterward, home again as they escape the confines of corporate scholasticism, and the dog walkers to enjoy fresh air and canine company, at least until the former is disturbed by the necessity of picking up the odoriferous left-overs of the latter. And now and then a little family gathering will spontaneously appear.

Most of the day and most of the year, however, the field lies empty and forlorn. Out comes the lower, trembling lip, the plaintive look, the silent plea for a playmate or two. Winter is especially hard. That's when the official "Keep off the Grass" signs come out. Then the dejected field is under quarantine, and only law-breakers and other ne'er-do-wells would even think to set foot on it, though it is beautiful under it's occasional blanket of untouched snow.

With the return of spring, though, the field takes on a light, playful airiness that exudes happiness and well-being, and, rather than making a lonely, half-hearted appeal to the odd passerby to come and sit for a while, the field beckons, nay, challenges, any and all who come near to kick off their shoes, run their toes through the grass, and, yes, pluck the tiny, lemon-buttered bonnets right off their stems. The sheer joy of seeing a nearly endless carpet of innocent, little yellow flowers is enough to bring the smile welling up out of the central core of the body until it bursts forth upon the face.

Once again, the child in the adult comes out, and for a brief few days in Spring, the fountain of youth is at our fingertips, and in our legs and feet, and toes and tummy. There will be more than enough time to be a responsible big person again. But just for now, I want to go play in the field and pick more, and more, and more buttercups.