Amo

You will surely be missed

a case for the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

Trouble Child--lyrics by Joni Mitchell

Up in a sterilized room
Where they let you be lazy
Knowing your attitude's all wrong
And you got to change
And that's not easy
Dragon shining with all values known
Dazzling you-keeping you from your own
Where is the lion in you to defy him
When you're this weak
And this spacey...

So what are you going to do about it
You can't live life and you can't leave it
Advice and religion-you can't take it
You can't seem to believe it
The peacock is afraid to parade
You're under the thumb of the maid
You really can't give love in this condition
Still you know how you need it

They open and close you
Then they talk like they know you
They don't know you
They're friends and they're foes too
Trouble child
Breaking like the waves at Malibu

So why does it come as such a shock
To know you really have no one
Only a river of changing faces
Looking for an ocean
They trickle through your leaky plans
Another dream over the dam
And you're lying in some room
Feeling like your right to be human
Is going over too
Well some are going to knock you
And some will try to clock you
You know it's really hard
To talk sense to you
Trouble child
Breaking like the waves at Malibu

the "first day of kindygarden" mugshot that every mother dreams of

kindergarten begins for the boy

Why is it that 5-year-olds spend precious minutes describing to their parents how they are about to defecate on themselves while crouching and grimacing, when the toilet is only steps away? I thought that the Freudian anal stage ended several years ago.

That is the best I could do for the segue into this blog entry on my big baby starting kindergarten in the morning.

We took a trip to Marble Slab Creamery to celebrate "The End of the Summer." Of course, that's just an expression for "The End of Freedom and Unaccountability," because the summer temperatures will be with us here in Tennessee for a couple more months. As it is, the big oak tree beside my house in the backyard has been turning yellow. Rain from Hurricane Fay finally reached us, forcing the faded leaves to drop like it is October in Illinois.

I'm going to try to be organized and pack up the lunch tonight. I know this won't last for more than a week! The sandwich shouldn't get soggy when it only has peanut butter on it. The metal thermos is ready to make its long-awaited appearance (whether this will be an embarrassment to him or not remains to be seen).

His school clothes are hanging neatly in the closet. Hours of laundry finally put away, a vicious cycle in which I have probably wasted a year of my life doing. We will choose the outfit in the morning. You know how it goes--all the best clothes for the first week, then the much-loved overwashed t-shirts get to be worn after that.

I will make the 5-minute drive to the front door of the school everyday. In a hard-won compromise, I agreed to let him take the bus home.

After the drop-off, the school is hosting a breakfast for the kindergarten parents. It's supposed to make us feel better about sending our babies off to school. I hope they are feeding us biscuits and gravy (I am not morphing into a Southerner. I've always loved those soft refined-grain biscuits smothered in fatty white gravy, even when I lived in Illinois, but could really only find a good platter of it at McDonald's, sadly). But Southern food is comfort food.

I've heard many people say something like "I'm a better parent with this one, now that I'm older." I've come to realize that I am still very much the same person that I was ten years ago, with many of the same dreams and desires, and even more fears. Not a better parent, but a more careful parent. Careful to guard their feelings and youth, to commit to memory occasions that may seem insignificant now but will tell the story of their lives down the road, to nurture their sense of humor as much as their intellectualism, to recognize beginnings and endings and savor them as long as I possibly can.

He forgot to take his blanket to bed, the tattered crib comforter left over from my oldest daughter. The batting has been replaced, but it also succumbed to countless trips being dragged along the floor.

He's screaming down the stairs that he needs this blanket. I yell for him from my chair at the computer desk to come and get it. He finds it in the dark and bounds back up to his bed. He's yelling again, "You forgot to cover me!" I resist the urge to say "You're a big boy, you can cover yourself." This is one of the last signs of his babyhood that I have left, and I'm not quite ready to let it go. I pull away from my writing and tuck him in once more.

letter from a working mom who rarely cooks

Honey,

Dinner is:

--pierogies in freezer (sorry about the mess!)

Boil them for a little while till they're soft, then brown in pan w/ butter (directions say thaw for 1/2 hour, but whatever you think is best)

--bacon in fridge to crumble and top them if you want (includes drawing of puffy-cheeked face to mean that this is probably not necessary for the meal, but will give it the "Southern edge," or curve, if you want to get technical)

--pork chops in fridge, can you bread them?

--applesauce jar in cupboard, that's for our fruit/vegetable group

Please write the days you need to work on the calendar. Also, I need you to return the Star Wars movie to the library tonight (last night I threw one of our home movies into the book return instead).

Sorry again about the mess! I was having a hard time finding all of the equipment I needed and the mixer wasn't working well for me. It kept spitting dough out everywhere.

Love,
me

P.S. I think I want the KMart table for the kitchen. We can sell it in a few years or donate it to Goodwill after the kids have defaced it.

August Heat Wave and the Cheese Drought

The heat has finally broken in Middle Tennessee, at least during the morning hours. With highs in the mid-80's and lows in the 60's at night, we can finally sleep without the air conditioning on. The sky has been overcast at sunrise over the past few days, but I don't think we've had anything more than teasingly scattered raindrops in over a month. Still, my lawn remains green. Our first year in this house and we've let the crabgrass run wild, much to my retired next-door neighbor's chagrin. But crabgrass is a beautiful thing when there's a stretch of dry days, because it lives on while everyone else is pumping water from the Harpeth river to save their fescue.

At work the other night, I asked around to see if anyone liked pierogies. I was unable to find anyone from the South that had ever even heard of them! You know, similar to potstickers, but with potato filling. The responses went something like "Potstickers, what are those?" and "Polish people, they have their own food?"

In their defense, though, Nashville nurses at my hospital who work the nightshift full-time typically have diets which consist of Taco Bell, Chinese take-out, and pizza. So they are really only exposed to Mexican, Asian and Italian cuisines, along with the occasional American burger joint such as Sonic. Oh, and Starbucks. Columbian.

So I went grocery shopping at Kroger to look for farmer's cheese to fill my pierogies, which when mixed with sugar makes a sweet cheese that reminds me of crepe filling. Anyways, I found one little 8 ounce package hidden away for $4.99. I was dismayed. Being from the North and having spent much time in Wisconsin, farmer's cheese was as easy to obtain up there as grits and salt-cured ham bodies are here. The package said "Made in Wisconsin." I've seen cows grazing in fields near my home. Surely some of them are used to make dairy products.

I guess I will have to settle for potato and cheddar cheese (from Ohio) pierogies until I find a good cow willing to donate to my cause.

Williamson County Fair

What is it about carnivals that the workers have to be so creepy? Is that one of the job requirements (must have a large, noticeable facial scar, a raspy voice, and hair that looks as if you've been manually pulling it out), because you certainly don't see normal people (e.g. salesmen in suits, pastors, nurses?--oh, forget it!) operating those machines. As Claire was having a ball on the kiddie cars, all I could think was "I wonder if this guy is a registered sex offender?" I am jaded in my old age, yet I have always thought about this, even when I was a kid. The weirdo-radar was programmed early, way back in Safety Town at age 4.

I was scolded by the woman in charge of the rotating pink elephants for fastening my two-year-old's seatbelt too tightly. In case of an emergency, she explained harshly, we need to be able to get the belt off quickly. Other than the bolt loosening and sending the elephant flying into the air like Dumbo, the only emergency I could think of would be my 2-year-old trying to be funny, wiggling to stand up, and falling out. Note to parents: always check behind the carnival people.

I need to have a side job as a carnival worker (after I get older and a little weirder-looking). I'm going to run one of those stands with all the goldfish bowls that you get 5 balls for $2 to throw in order to win a fish. They must make a killing, considering that you can buy feeder fish 12 for $1.99 at Walmart, and it's so difficult to get a ping-pong ball into one of those little bowls. Imagine how the fish feel, with balls bouncing all around them.

Either that, or I can buy a mobile food stand and a vat of frying grease and offer up all the Southern delicacies that anyone will buy. My favorites are fried Oreos (double-stuffed), and sweet potato fries. By the way, spellcheck replaced "oreos" with "oleos." Hmmmm....fried margarine, now that's a new one that I bet the Southern chefs haven't dabbled in.

Okay, my spellcheck program is WAY
behind the times here.
It underlined Walmart as a misspelled word!

Cheekwood Botanical Garden

Please click on the images for better detail. You can't really get an essence of the beauty of the leaves, hips, or flowers from looking at the overview of a tree.

Crepe Myrtle trunk

Weeping Norway Spruce

Smoketree

Smoketree detail

Laceleaf Chaste Tree

Laceleaf Chaste tree, detail of leaves

Laceleaf Chaste tree with closer view of flowers

Study in Magnolia

There is a great value in the aesthetics
of the Magnolia tree
outside of the fully-opened flower.

Observations from my backyard

Can anyone venture a guess at what this is? Let's just say that it wasn't on the realtor's MLS listing.

Maybe a closer shot will help solve the puzzle

A wild strawberry

My backyard will be pleased to know that today it has made my blog. Finally, after months of trouble getting the photos off the camera and into the computer, some technological miracle has occurred. It is a painstaking process, about a minute per picture. But I am now able to show the world the wonders of Middle Tennessee, at least from my vantage point.

Claire and I began early in the day by providing a feast for the birds (of bread, and semi-stale at that). I had found several loaves that were so old they were beginning to get moist in the bag, but not quite in the green stage of decomposition. A mini-loaf of Italian bread that could break plexiglass lurked behind the jelly, a sure place to get lost in the refrigerator. It was the good, bakery kind--loaded with steamed whole cloves of garlic.

Later on, while watching the common birds--robins, cardinals, blue jays and grackles--fight over the scraps, we learned some things about bird behavior. Blue jays and robins seem to despise one another, pecking and kicking at eachother as they fly. The outgoing grackles swoop down in the interim to get what they can salvage, taking advantage of the animosity between the others.

Garlic bread is not a favorite for anyone out here in the backyard. The truly brave souls are the grackles, oftentimes seen hovering around people-places waiting for scraps to fall, where they unapologetically snatch them up. It is only the grackles who even attempt to peck at the first chunk (it was too hard to break into pieces, so I hope that rain will fall to make it a bit more palatable). Upon finding this first bite unsatisfactory, they move on to the larger loaf lying in the tall crabgrass nearby. One sample of that, and up they fly. This same scenario repeats itself with scores of birds. Several of them pause before tasting and tilt their little heads sideways, kind-of like my dog does when I'm making howling noises (or singing. I wouldn't lie about such a thing, as Nashville is thematically the wrong place for me to be due to this fact).

I wonder if some of those same birds have come back to try again, given that there are so many flying in and out of the area, in hopes to find something different or better. I imagine that tomorrow morning the garlic loaves will be lying there still intact and loaded with ants, the crabgrass obscuring them just a little more.