Commencement and its Aftermath

Graduations are tough on parents, even though they are the ultimate objective, the goal and the prize.

Just this last week I watched two of my three children receive diplomas: the eldest got two bachelor's degrees from the University of Maryland and Sister got her high school diploma from Our Lady of Good Counsel High School.

Yay! Hooray!  


Where does that leave me?

Because to paraphrase Saint Paul: when I was a child's mother I acted as a child's mother; now I am a man's mother, and a woman's.

What do they want from me? What do they need? 

It gets harder and harder to tell. 


I've heard the expression 'little kids, little problems; big kids big problems' but that isn't it, exactly. Grown up kids tend to have invisible problems, needs that are harder to know -- lives that are theirs to put in order, and not their parents' anymore.

When children grow up you shift from being 'Mommy' to being 'mom;' from providing life and protection and sustenance to being an occasional source of money and lodging and rides; from solving every problem for them to praying they've got what it takes to solve every problem themselves.

To be a good parent is to create your own pink slip, I guess: the goal is to parent them until they don't need much parenting, and then just sit back and try to relax. Hope you did it right.


I'm proud of my graduates: they worked hard, they made art -- they made friends. They remained true to themselves and not false to any other man -- just like we taught them to do. 

As #1 Son pointed out to me recently, these three don't just love but they like each other. They have each other's backs and share an understanding of what it means to be who they are. They harmonize. And the three of them treat their father and me to a comedy show every time we're all together.


Which won't be as frequent in the future as it was in the past, what with commencement and all. I'll just have to have a cap-and-gown cupcake and get over it.
















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The Ghost in the Old Mill/A Shot in the Dark

So Friday afternoon we were driving down to the beach, and it was one of those poor-timing days that made the trip seem much longer than it actually was: a forgotten ipod, a pitstop at 7-11 for Slurpees and ice; the mysterious force of nature that inexplicably slows traffic just before Annapolis.

I took the detour at Chesapeake College even though traffic on 50 didn't compel me to -- just thought a little scenic backroads meander through Wye would be nice -- and we stopped at the historic Wye Grist Mill, built over the creek that separates Talbot and Queen Anne's counties. 

It's a beautiful, historic spot with a structure that dates back to 1682, and while the mill itself was closed on a Friday at 7 pm it was nice to see the ancient millstones and touch the weathered bricks and linger beneath the magnificent weeping willow that dominates the bend in the creek.

I got my camera and started snapping in the fading sunlight of an early May evening: the pair of ducks on the creek bank, the weathered wooden clapboard,the the terracotta-colored blades of the watermill itself. It was tranquil and beautiful. 


At one point we approached the Dutch door, which was locked. At the place where the door's top and bottom halves meet there was a bit of a gap, and so I stuck the lens of my little point-and shoot camera into the dark crevice and clicked.

And life went on: we finished the drive down, listening to Bruce on E Street Radio, and pulled into our little place in Ocean Pines to reunite with Will and the dogs, who were already there. 


Will cooked up some penne and mussels, which I quickly snapped pictures of for yesterday's blog about ersatz pasta. And when I uploaded the day's pictures and had a look I was a little startled by one of them.

Yup. The one I took unseeing of the interior of the Wye Grist Mill.

Now, I don't know what it looks like in there -- I've never been inside. I have no idea if there are exhibits of pictures or mannequins or anything. 

I just know that the picture seemed a little weird to me. It gave me goosebumps, to tell the truth, but I am a person with a pretty wild imagination. Still, I see a hooded figure and the face and torso of a man. I do.

I don't know about ghosts. I do think there are things in this Earth that are beyond the realm of understanding. I believe in the energy of the spirit, and I believe in the soul and in heaven and in God. I believe there is some kind of picture within the picture I took -- a picture that I haven't cropped or enhanced in any way. And I wonder what you think.

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Al dente's Inferno: Whippin' Up Quick, Easy, Ersatz Pasta

I love pasta, but I don't always treat it right.

I am not Italian, I don't really know the rules, and like many an Irish-American chef before me I can confess to egregious errors in the preparation of the glorious offspring of flour, oil and egg yolk.

Bless me padre: I've used jar sauce when I should have made a gravy from tomatoes and garlic. I dump frozen veggies into my lasagna and use ground turkey for my meatballs. 

I've been known to toast up a wholegrain baguette slathered with butter and garlic powder and sully the authenticity of an entire meal. I don't know lamb shanks from Longshanks: Once -- under extreme duress -- I broke up a bunch of frozen pre-made burgers into a jar of Ragu, sauteed an onion and called it bolognese sauce. (It wasn't really that bad.)

I know unorthodox pasta dishes are frowned upon by my Italian friends but I found one recently that I love so much I just have to share it. It's quick, easy, adaptable to whatever you have on hand and makes cleanup a breeze. It's a little weird until you get used to it, and I feel a little weird telling you about it.

But...

Damn the tortellinis! Full speed ahead.

OK, forget about your strainer and your big-ass pot of water and whether you salt the water or break the pasta or rinse the starch or throw a strand against the backsplash to test for al denteness -- it's all moot. 

You just need a frying pan: a skillet, a saute pan, whatever you call it. Put any kind of pasta in there, as much as you need, and cover it with cold liquid. Water is OK; vegetable broth (or chicken or beef broth) is better. You got a splash of white wine? In it goes. 

As the water warms up, add olive oil and a shaved clove of garlic or two -- think Paulie Cicero in Goodfellas -- and maybe some spices. Then once it's boiling add vegetables, or seafood, or whatever you want to cook into the dish. Quick-cookers like peas or spinach can get dropped in near the end of the process.

For mac and cheese add a little flour at the boil, then some milk, then stir in shredded cheese. (Skim milk and low-fat Cabot cheddar works great!) For a red sauce just add tomatoes at the end. (If you use Ragu I promise I won't tell anyone.)


The idea is that the pasta will just absorb the liquid in which it's cooked, gaining flavor and texture, and whatever's left over can be part of the sauce. 

Veggies work incredibly well, as does shellfish -- these pics show our one-pan adventures with mussels, pasta primavera, mac and cheese -- and the whole shebang takes about ten minutes. You need to pay attention, though, and regulate your boil and the amount of liquid. But it's well worth the incredibly minimal effort to make a really nice meal that everybody in the family will like.

Me & Sendak: Milk In The Batter, Birthday Soup, and Writing In Capital Letters

I think I killed Maurice Sendak.

Not literally, but there's a tradition that if you talk excessively about a celebrity and then that celebrity dies you take a little of the responsibility. It's weird, but these coincidences happen -- it goes back to Yul Brynner's passing in 1985 (it was a college thing) so there you go.

Anyway this morning I was working on a project and wanted to quote Little Bear -- the first book I can remember loving -- so I googled Maurice Sendak just about a half hour before I saw the first of a million RIPs on social media.

And even though I was planning to blog about this very cool new way I learned to cook pasta I'm going to take a few minutes to ruminate on Maurice Sendak and what he meant to me.

Would it be melodramatic to say everything? And if I do say that, should I put it in capital letters -- EVERYTHING -- with plenty of exclamation points? Because that is how Maurice Sendak showed me how to write: exuberantly. Unabashedly. And without a thought for what anyone might think.

Milk in the batt-er. Milk in the batt-er. Sendak made words dance on the page to their own unique rhythm, just the same way ideas bounce around in your head.  He played with words, made them do tricks, and used them to unlock the emotions of his readers.

He was an illustrator, yes, but he was an artist in the medium of the alphabet, too, and he knew about the weight of a word and its texture and the way it could hold the hand of the next word in a sentence, or turn its back and stand alone.

As I remember you could spot a Maurice Sendak book from across a crowded children's library; even now the cover art seems to undulate at the edges, rippling with the promise of the roiling waves of storytelling within. To read his work was to dive into a dream, to be carried away on a goblin's back, to sail off to subdue the wild things that sometimes took over even the purest of loving-child-hearts. 

Maurice Sendak was unique without trying.
He was truth in all its tawdry ridiculousness, making literature out of monsters and cake -- two of the things that captivated me as a child -- and cutting through the adages and moral-of-the-story stuff.  He was censored -- heaven forbid any child should get an eyeful of cartoon wiener -- but that only added to his appeal.

I didn't know that his worldview was colored by his place in a family of Holocaust survivors, or that he was bedridden as a child and learned to love books in his isolation, or that he worked closely with Jim Henson and the Children's Television Workshop. I just knew Little Bear.

Sendak didn't write Little Bear -- Else Helmelund Minarik did -- but it was the first book I remember, the first book I could read by myself, the first time I experienced the words and the pictures coming together to fill in each others' blanks. 

I identified with Little Bear's anxiety -- did his mother forget his birthday? -- and his drama -- he needs a coat in the snow! -- and his imagination -- he goes to the moon, and to China -- and Sendak's drawings completely captured me. 

When I became a mom I shared Little Bear with my children and was able to see the equation from the other side: to be Little Bear's loving-but-put-upon mother this time, to read the simple words with a different emotion.

Where the Wild Things Are was his signature, celebrated work, and with good reason. It's just an excellent book -- a piece of poetry distilled inside a work of art. Everyone on the planet identifies with WTWTA, and yet it is excruciatingly personal for everyone who's ever read it. 

It's a preposterous idea, but one that works perfectly: Taking a child's tantrum and a mother's discipline and creating a metaphor for love, life, forgiveness and reconciliation that transcends the human experience. It's sublime and ridiculous and true -- and what Maurice Sendak will always be best remembered for.


That and the cartoon wieners.

 

Fifty Shades of WTH...or 'Sorry, Christian, It Wasn't That Good For Me'

I love a good book.

Which is why I need to say that -- unlike every other woman-over-forty on Planet Earth -- I didn't really like Fifty Shades of Grey.

You know, the little book that could; the one that started as fan fiction based on the Twilight Series and ended up #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

The sexy book. 


I wanted to like it -- why not? A little erotic fiction never did any harm, right? And now in the era of the Kindle and the Nook even the most respectable ladies can sneak a little mood-elevating contraband into their day. Or night, even.

I ordered it from Amazon, feeling a little naughty as I did. And I read it and yes -- there was a lot going on.


But in between the sexytimes, EL James' book is trite, cliched and booooorrrring. The heroine is smart, righteous and (naturally) super-beautiful -- but she has no idea how super beautiful she is!!! The hero is young, handsome, kind, attentive and (naturally) a billionaire -- and he has a sexy S+M playroom!!! But there is nothing weird about it! Honestly! It's a super-norms sexy S+M playroom that is completely un-abnormal!

The 'juicy' parts -- sexy-love! Naughty fun! Flirty bondage! Tickling! Helicopter rides! -- might be exciting at first, but after a while they become part of the snoozefest.

They lack depth, probably because they're underpinned by an excruciatingly boring story about a 22 year old graduating from college and getting a job and eating pancakes and visiting her parents and meeting her 27 year old hunky-billionaire-submissive/dominant-fetishist-Prince Charming's family and trying to rebuff his fabulous lovetokens: Clothes! Jewels! A Car!

Subtract the sex and it's Seventeen Magazine.

Imagine a "man-writer" like Jonathan Frantzen channeling George Costanza's Do Everything The Exact Opposite philosophy into a novel "for women." 

Hmmmm...what do they want? A perfect-y world of Frette sheets, gourmet food and wine, good-natured moms and dads, and love that finds a way in between hi-jinks in the bedroom -- oops, I mean in the sexy, naughty S+M playroom. My bad.

I thought I could skip over the boring parts -- even as a kid I was a big page-skipper, neglecting the bulk of Little Women for the scenes where Laurie and Amy fall in love in Italy; finding the dog-eared pages in the paperback copy of Judy Blume's Forever that someone with a less-conservative mom had let me borrow in seventh grade.

Those books were good, though. Gripping. They had characters, and plots, and details. Fifty Shades has...sex. And twentysomethings. 

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's just not doing it for me. 


Give me Eliza Bennet as a heroine, or Jo March, or Lucy Honeychurch -- or even Kit Tyler from The Witch of Blackbird Pond. 

Give me Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms or Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby or Molly Bloom in Ulysses -- she doesn't need to be perfect, or even old, just exciting and adventurous and multi-faceted and self-fulfilled. Keep your mealy-mouthed Anastasia Steele and her fifty shades of submission.

And while you're at it keep your Christian Grey -- give me Christian Bale! As Theodore Laurence, of course. Give me Fitzwilliam D'Arcy, or Heathcliff, or Julien Sorel -- that dude was sexy! -- Jamie Fraser from the Outlander series or, ooooooh, Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre. Sexy to the burnt-and-blinded bitter end.


Look, I usually like what I'm expected to like as a lady-reader: The Help. The Hunger Games. Everything Anita Shreve and Anna Quindlen ever wrote. I am not trying to be contrary here. 

But The Unbearable Lightness of Being this ain't. 

 It took me forever to get to the end of Fifty Shades of Grey -- the climax, if you will. After a while it became a chore: Every night I'd find myself going through the motions, but in the end Christian Grey just didn't turn me on.


Fifty shades of boredom, that's my verdict. I'm sorry I submitted to it.

My Week In Birds: Cardinal Sins, Birdhouse and Owl B. Sure

One bird that did not cross my path: Larry.

My week in birds begins with the chicks at BookClub.

I mean, what happens at BookClub stays at BookClub of course, but among our topics of conversation Wednesday night was the crazy cardinals around here that try to launch themselves through shut windows.

The BookClub ladies and I live in a lush, wooded neighborhood tucked just inside the Agricultural Reserve here in Montgomery County, MD -- and we have a ringside seat for some serious wildlife: bunnies, deer and foxes; beautiful bats, woodchucks, possibly a coyote. And the birds! Chickadees hatching, bluebirds in boxes, woodpeckers, tanagers and orioles -- it's birdie bliss.

The cardinals are usually the ones trying to get in: they see their reflection in the window, think they have a rival, and it's Charles Bronson in Death Wish. Over the years we've had to clean up actual cardinal suicide scenes from the deck...move along, birdies, there's nothing to see...

Anyway, when Friday rolled around I was working on a freelance project and I had the deck doors open so the dogs could come and go. The phone rang: it was Sister J, who has been unbelievably busy during her penultimate week of high school, taking tests and running around working on a film project. Senioritis my arse, the kid has been working her little buns off. But she'd been feeling lousy, too, and now the sore throat and sore eyes had morphed into pinkeye.

A bird in the hand...is not a good idea.

And while she's calling me from the health room to see how we could get her to a doctor, get a prescription for antibiotic eye drops, and get her back to school to continue shooting, sing in her final chorus concert, and go on a double date,  I notice that there's a bird in my kitchen.

Not a big bird, a small one. Small and fluttery. Hopping into the pantry, flying over the island, trying to get out the closed windows -- failing -- and fluttering into the next room to try the windows there.

What would you do?

I freaked out a little. Told my sick daughter (who hates birds, coincidentally) I had to go: There's a BIRD in the house!

Opened all the downstairs windows and then closed all the upstairs doors: There's a CAT in the house, and I didn't want to be cleaning up the aftermath of a Tigger-birdie showdown.

By the time I was pretty certain the bird hadn't flown upstairs into cat territory the flutter-noises had stopped and the bird was nowhere to be found. I went through the house making bird-scaring noises, kind of like The Long Island Medium does with her sticks of burning sage, urging the bird to fly away now while he could.

Then I closed the windows and went to deal with the plague o'pinkeye. (Is it any wonder I'm a basket case?)

He looked like this guy but bigger...and crowpecked.

But lest you think that was my last bird experience, well, it wasn't. This morning -- Sunday -- I woke up and came downstairs to the usual jubilant greeting that Pippin and Merry give anyone who may, potentially, either feed them or take them for a walk. It's shameless the way they carry on, really, but I loaded up the leashes and got the doody bags and away we go.

There's an unusually loud bird-ruckus in the trees along the driveway but I think nothing of it. It's spring, right?

 But as we make our way down the street the ruckus moves toward us, and I turn to see an owl being chased by five crows...chased from a tree in my front yard to my neighbor's tree, two doors down. 

The owl -- clearly ill or in distress -- perched in the tree as the crows had at him, swooping and pecking, and I just gaped at them all, wondering why in holy hell I had neglected to bring my camera or even my cell phone on this morning's walk.

It was amazing to see the owl up close; upsetting to see him set upon this way, though, as the crows screamed and cawed and eventually chased him back into the woods behind the houses. The dogs were oblivious, eager to go say hi to a toy poodle dressed in a red sweater we could see at the top of the cul de sac.

They're for the birds, those two.

Patricia Krentcil, 'Tan Ann,' Snooki and Mother of the Year Moments

Today I wanted to blog about Patricia Krentcil, the New Jersey mom who's been accused of burning her fair-haired five-year-old in a tanning booth.

The pictures reminded me of Tan Ann, which is the mean name a very two-faced person I used to know called a friend behind her back. An extremely tan friend, of course, who was fighting getting older and cranking up the workouts and salon visits without realizing the havoc those tanning beds were wreaking on her face.

Nobody told her or anything -- they just mocked her behind her back. Tan Ann.

It's funny, right, to make fun of people for their nasty tan and wrinkly skin? Haha -- they think they look great but they really look like a troll doll, or an old Coach bag, amirite?

OK, no. So I am not going to rag on the fact that in some of the news video Tanning Booth Mom Patricia Krentcil looks like she's rubbed shoe polish on her face a la Al Jolson. It's a look -- a dangerous one, no doubt, and one that I find leagues beyond unattractive. But she's a grown woman.  Obesity is dangerous and unattractive, too, albeit easier to understand and empathize with than tanorexia.

But here's the thing: the New Jersey mom has got some issues, clearly. She doesn't seem to rate an A+ when it comes to being coherent. Even Snooki called her "crazy." Snooki! Is she a bad mother? And if she is...what then?
 
I mean, all of us have what I call our Mother of the Year Moments. You miss the orientation meeting; you forget that the concert is tonight; you neglect to order the yearbook or the tee shirt. They wake up with their tooth still under their pillow, eat fudge Pop Tarts for breakfast, go to Spirit Day in the wrong colors. 

Sometimes, even in the most loving homes, the sky gets darker than anyone ever wanted it to and children get glimpses of really bad things: financial insecurity, addiction, infidelity, terminal illness. No life is perfect; no parent gets it completely right.  

My mom was a tanner -- a beach-loving, black-Irish lady who to this very day finds a tan attractive (though she stays out of the sun because of her heart medication) -- and I, too, enjoy a bit of beach bronzing. (Do I slather my children with SPF 50? I do.) Being tan doesn't make you a bad mother. Being "crazy" might not either.

So I want to cut Patricia Krentcil some slack. I do. I think her obsession is unhealthy and bizarre and I hope she gets the help she clearly needs. And I hope her daughter manages to grow up loving herself and valuing everything she is, not just what she looks like or how she conforms to society's idea of beauty.


It occurred to me when we adopted our rescue dog Merry -- whose coal-black hue is natural, not sunbed-enhanced -- that there's a whole lot more paperwork involved in bringing a pet home from the shelter than in bringing a baby home from the hospital. And that there's a lot of concern for the unborn that isn't necessarily matched by a concern for children who are born into poverty, or whose home-and-family circumstances put them in a precarious situation for a variety of reasons.


A pet-rescue home-screening volunteer might have found Patricia Krentcil's tanning habit alarmingly expensive and time-consuming for a potential pet owner. A rescue volunteer might question her ability to love a pet unconditionally when she clearly doesn't love herself, or cite her recklessness with her own health as a reason not to entrust her with the responsibility for an animal's health. 

But nobody screens potential parents that way -- and there are worse parents than Patricia Krentcil, as the news tells us every day. Snooki, take note.