Sunday Funnies

Overheard conversation between Snicky and McGyva:

Snicky, to McGyva, who is sporting an exaggerated frown because she won't give him a big hug: "Are you sad, Daddy?"

"Yes, I am."

"I'm going to make you happy."

"That's very nice!"

"I'm making something for you!"

"Oh! Yeah? What are you making?"

"I'm pooping."

* * *

Snicky, talking into her toy phone:

"Mommy is doing well." Pause. "But she's sick."

* * *

Poetry Friday

It's been a rough week for the Zen household. McGyva and I have both spent most of the week sick with what we suspect is food poisoning. The sight and smell of food still makes me queasy, something that I have to do my best to suppress, since I have to cook three meals a day for the little one, who, mercifully, did not get sick. One of the few things I have been able to stomach is some French bread with butter. Butter, and its fatty constitution, is probably not the wisest choice for an upset stomach, but sometimes what does wonders for the palate and morale rescues the rest too...

Butter
by Connie Wanek


Butter, like love,
seems common enough
yet has so many imitators.
I held a brick of it, heavy and cool,
and glimpsed what seemed like skin
beneath a corner of its wrap;
the decolletage revealed
a most attractive fat!


And most refined.
Not milk, not cream,
not even crème de la crème.
It was a delicacy which assured me
that bliss follows agitation,
that even pasture daisies
through the alchemy of four stomachs
may grace a king's table.


We have a yellow bowl near the toaster
where summer's butter grows
soft and sentimental.
We love it better for its weeping,
its nostalgia for buckets and churns
and deep stone wells,
for the press of a wooden butter mold
shaped like a swollen heart.

Happy Friday, everyone!

Et Tu... and an English Lesson

Snicky has loved Minxie from day one. It's been a very one-sided admiration although the cat has warmed up somewhat to the child. Recently the manifestations of this love for the cat have gone overboard. As in my having to rush into the room to pry the cat from the child's loving arms.

On most days I might have to do this approximately every few minutes.

The cat looks absolutely bewildered and horrified.

But this begs the question: if it's SO horrible as her spooked demeanor suggests, then why, OH WHY, does she deliberately and insistently park herself in front of the child day after day?

I suspect it's just to have the schadenfreude-ish pleasure of watching Snicky get in trouble...

This morning, however, there were indications that even the deepest of devotions has its limits.

Snicky wanted to draw with her marker.

Her RED marker.

Not the blue, purple, or green one. It had to be the red one, for whatever reason the artistic muse who was inspiring her decided. Of course the red one was the missing one.

So we scouted the house for one missing red Crayola marker, up and down and around.

"Where's the marker, Mommy?" Snicky asked tearfully.

"I don't know. Where did you put it?"

Repeat this conversation some 384 times and you'll get an idea of my morning.

"Is it under the coffee table? Is it in the toy basket?" I asked as we searched under furniture.

Minxie casually sauntered into the room.

And suddenly the child stopped her searching, looked at the cat and there was this look of pained betrayal.

"Did Minxie 'tooked' it???"

We eventually found the marker in the toy basket (mercifully, with the top on- can you imagine if it had been dry?) and much merriment was made...But I checked Minxie's bed...just in case.

* * * * *

Snicky had a 24-hour tummy bug last week. It was a nasty thing that caused her to throw up several times before she settled into a restless sleep during the night. It startled her because she had never really thrown up before.

The first time after it happened (and there were several incidents, including one on Daddy's Burberry shirt [which made me kinda smirk because he'd been giving me pointers on how to efficiently handle the situation]) she looked at me and inquired:

"Mommy...Did I 'pooked'?"

It was too cute, but I had to correct her:

"No, sweetie- You 'tossed your cookies..."

Poetry Friday

Although there is no allusion to it, I can't help but think of Lilith's children (Lilith, who is often described as a demon, but I prefer the Greek daemon for this intriguing woman), while reading this poem: shadowy beings living in the fringes of reality, tricksterish, protective of their knowledge. Forests seem to be perfect portals for light and dark to coexist...

It also reminded me a movie I like a lot: Pi.

Forest Children
by Colette Inez


We heard swifts feeding in air,
sparrows ruffling dusty feathers,
a tapping on stones, mud, snow, pulp
when rain came down, the hiss of fire.
Counting bird eggs in a dome of twigs,
we heard trees fall and learned
to name them on a page for school.


And living among trees, in the shadows
of their leaves and seeds, we had
the mystery of numbers, we believed,
from figuring angles of the sun
or counting stumps in a widening field.
Each day saws substracted boughs
for books of double algebra, equations
in a text we carried home
past hacked down pines.


Conjuring the spirit of the grove,
in a circle we sang:
“Mark out planes of shade and light
that seedlings might root.”
One morning in spring
trees showed winter skeletons
through smoke, abrupt curves, bent oak.
We were stripped of words to cast a spell.


“Algebra cadabra,” someone shouted
pointing to a vanished nest
we remembered as braided of moss,
ivy tendrils and spider’s silk.

Happy Friday, everyone!

Cheeky Truck

I have decided to always have my cell phone's camera ready to spring into action when I am out and about because there is always something unsual or funny I want to remember to share later.

Like this truck:

And yes, I took a detour to make sure I got the shot (Alewife exit off Route 2, for Boston dwellers- so, not a really terrible detour...).

Poetry Friday...


Today
by Billy Collins


If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze


that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house


and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,


a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies


seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking


a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,


releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage


so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting


into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.

Happy Weekend, everyone!

Poetry Friday and The Art of Discipline...


Secret History
by Charles Simic

Of the light in my room:
Its mood swings,
Dark-morning glooms,
Summer ecstasies.

Spider on the wall,
Lamp burning late,
Shoes left by the bed,
I'm your humble scribe.

Dust balls, simple souls
Conferring in the corner.
The pearl earring she lost,
Still to be found.

Silence of falling snow,
Night vanishing without trace,
Only to return.
I'm your humble scribe.

Happy Friday, everyone!

***

I thought Snicky had reached the pinnacle of these so-called Terrible Twos before friends began telling me that the Threes aren't a gondola ride down the Main Canal. I have had to pull rank and do the whole disciplining thing.

We tend to favor the "Naughty Step" technique, which involves a time-out after three warnings with minutes commensurate with the child's age. So Snicky gets 2 minutes at the foot of the stairs. Normally we rarely get past the count of two, but since the past week, she's been getting a time out once a day. One was for biting me on the shoulder, the other for hitting my hand away after warning #1, the other for screaming at the top of her lungs every few minutes when she didn't get something she wanted...all odd occurrences because Snicky is usually very sweet and not aggressive at all.

She usually hates being put on the step and either cries a little, or calls for me. Longest two minutes of the day- although the make-up hugs and kisses are this technique's saving grace. Plus the fact that she typically won't repeat the offending behavior.

Except for this morning.

Snicky was yelling and jumping and mad faced and all the bells and whistles that accompany full-fledged tantrums. McGyva, who was getting dressed for work, peeked out the bedroom door and warned sternly: "That's a one."

After which our child, nonchalantly, turned to me and stated: "I want to go to the Naughty Step."

Yup.
We're in trouble.

Every once in a while you stumble across a story originally geared towards children, but that has a timeless appeal to it. I like these types of stories because they harness what storytelling is all about; they're the tasty fruit sheltering the seed that plants itself in our imaginations and blossoms in wondrous ways.

I ran across such a story today.

After a disappointing start to our day (I got the dates confused for Snicky's Baby Yoga class and showed up a week early...) I decided we could use a little cheering up at the local bookstore. Snicky loves picture books and we tend to favor anything about puppies, but today an author's name caught my attention, mostly because I did not expect to find him among the children's books: Jacques Prévert.

Prévert was a wonderful French poet, Surrealist, screenwriter (Les Enfants du Paradis, an epic of a film, was penned by him), and free spirit. He wrote a poem that artist and Caldecott medalist Mordecai Gerstein translated and illustrated: How to Paint the Portrait of a Bird is an ode to the artistic spirit in all of us. Sweetly illustrated without becoming saccharine or precious, the book's message is simple, yet movingly profound. Like most truths, in fact.

I picked it up without reading it first and wasn't disappointed. Snicky and I read it twice today, per her request, making me feel goofily happy and pleased...

So if you want to give some magic to a little one in your life, or want to recapture that joy, I recommend this gem of a book.

Poetry Whenever

I was thinking about what kind of poem I'd like to put here during Holy Week, which always makes me introspective. For a long time I couldn't get why this was the holiest and highest of all the holidays for Catholics- for me it should have been Christmas, because, after all if the child had never arrived in the first place, then there would have been nothing else.

Then I started studying myth and folklore, my main field, and began to see that there was a theme: a deity who dies, but escapes the finality of death. Instead the deity reinvents itself and through that process eliminates some stagnation, some cycle of destruction from the cosmos. And that is all very good for us. I think of not only Jesus, of course, but of the West African trickster messenger god Eshu, killed at the crossroads, a kind of cross, and Osiris, from Egyptian myth, murdered by his brother (creation stories are filled with quarreling brothers, come to think of it) and resurrected by his wife, Isis, the Great Mother. There is Odin, in Norse myth, who hangs for nine days on the Yggdrasil, the World Tree, an Axis Mundi, in order to obtain sacred wisdom. The Hero Twins from the Mayan epic the Popol Vuh (probably one of my favorite), Jaguar-Hunter and Hunter-Deer, agree to immolate themselves over the fires of the Lords of Xibalba, or hell, just to return as more powerful magicians who can defeat them. Dionysus, of the Greek pantheon, is born from Zeus' (his father) thigh after his expectant mother, Semele, is destroyed after beholding Zeus in his true form. The beautiful Sumerian goddess Inana also makes a gruesome descent into the Underworld, where she is made to give up a piece of her wardrobe at each gate, and is killed and left hanging until she swaps places with her no-good husband.

There are more examples, of course, but the rebirth theme applies to more than just the reappearance of the god. It is recreating. Reinvention. A type of new year, so to speak, in the sense that there is a purging of old, bad, destructive habits that poison us and kill us in so many ways. We let go, we forgive, we move on, changed, like Odysseus' men, who after their transformation into swine by the enchantress Circe, emerge younger and handsomer.

So for Holy Week the poem selected is by Massachusetts native Anne Sexton. I find this is a beautiful poem about loss, longing, love...and letting go.

All My Pretty Ones
by Anne Sexton


Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart
where you followed our mother to her cold slumber;
a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,
leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber
you from the residence you could not afford:
a gold key, your half of a woolen mill,
twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford,
the love and legal verbiage of another will,
boxes of pictures of people I do not know.
I touch their cardboard faces. They must go.


But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,
hold me. I stop here, where a small boy
waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...
for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy
or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.
Is this your father’s father, this commodore
in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile
has made it unimportant who you are looking for.
I’ll never know what these faces are all about.
I lock them into their book and throw them out.


This is the yellow scrapbook that you began
the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly
as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran
the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me
and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went
down and recent years where you went flush
on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant
to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.
But before you had that second chance, I cried
on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died.


These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.
Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;
here, with the winner’s cup at the speedboat races,
here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,
here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes,
running like show-bred pigs in their chain-link pen;
here, at the horseshow where my sister wins a prize;
and here, standing like a duke among groups of men.
Now I fold you down, my drunkard, my navigator,
my first lost keeper, to love or look at later.


I hold a five-year diary that my mother kept
for three years, telling all she does not say
of your alcoholic tendency. You overslept,
she writes. My God, father, each Christmas Day
with your blood, will I drink down your glass
of wine? The diary of your hurly-burly years
goes to my shelf to wait for my age to pass.
Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.
Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,
bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.

Peace, everyone.

----------------
Now playing: Peter Gabriel - Mercy Street
via FoxyTunes

Poetry Friday (on a Saturday...)

I'm shameless. I admit it.

We've had a lot of rain this past week- rain that drums over our heads, running down shingles and browned leaves through a murky course down our gutters. The sky is gray and the snow has melted away to give us a glimpse of all we neglected in the fall: a carpet of loamy leaves, a mosaic of decay over the flattened grass. And yet I can't help feeling cautiously joyful because I know that first come the crocuses and then the tulips, just as impatient as I am to go play outside. There was a hint of warmth in the air that I hadn't felt in a very long time this week, and that was a blessed relief.

A walk a couple days ago revealed the massive task before us. While Snicky pranced in muddy puddles in her galoshes, I took inventory of everything necessary to make this garden breathe again: pruning, weeding, mulching, planting. I looked at the plot reserved for vegetables and pondered what to plant this year without disturbing the perennial chives.

There is so much to look forward to this spring and summer, despite the amount of work awaiting. For one, we got a farm share through The Food Project. I like the idea of supporting a local farm that does such significant social projects with the community. I like fresh, local veggies and I like the element of surprise and the challenge of having to cook with something I might have avoided or overlooked. Like last year when I ended up with a bunch of chards. I never knew I'd like them so much.

So I am feeling a little restless, like Hadrian in D.H. Lawrence's short story You Touched Me. Except my Matilda is the fair weather.


Much in Little
by Yvor Winters


Amid the iris and the rose,
The honeysuckle and the bay,
The wild earth for a moment goes
In dust or weed another way.


Small though its corner be, the weed
Will yet intrude its creeping beard;
The harsh blade and the hairy seed
Recall the brutal earth we feared.


And if no water touch the dust
In some far corner, and one dare
To breathe upon it, one may trust
The spectre on the summer air:


The risen dust alive with fire,
The fire made visible, a blur
Interrate, the pervasive ire
Of foxtail and of hoarhound burr.

Happy Weekend, everyone!

Poetry Friday Bonanza!

Because I went and missed last Friday, here are TWO poems!
My excuse? I was sick. And Snicky was sick. With nasty little colds. Nuff said.

And starting next week I will try to post a little more regularly. I know. Bold and bolder and always later...

There may be Chaos still around the World
by George Santayana

There may be chaos still around the world,
This little world that in my thinking lies;
For mine own bosom is the paradise
Where all my life’s fair visions are unfurled.
Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled,
Unmindful of the changing outer skies,
Where now, perchance, some new-born Eros flies,
Or some old Cronos from his throne is hurled.
I heed them not; or if the subtle night
Haunt me with deities I never saw,
I soon mine eyelid’s drowsy curtain draw
To hide their myriad faces from my sight.
They threat in vain; the whirlwind cannot awe
A happy snow-flake dancing in the flaw.


But wait! There's more:

Canary
by Rita Dove for Michael S. Harper

Billie Holiday’s burned voice
had as many shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.

(Now you’re cooking, drummer to bass,
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to
with your mirror and your bracelet of song.)

Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.

If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

Happy Friday, everyone!

Foodie Poetry and Post

Onions
by William Matthews

How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the saute pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.


This could mean soup or risotto
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see


clearly the cataracts in them.
It’s true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least


recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there’s nothing to an onion
but skin, and it’s true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest


and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare


and rage and murmury animal
comfort that infant humans secrete.
This is the best domestic perfume.
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-washed
hands and lift to your mouth a hint


of a story about loam and usual
endurance. It’s there when you clean up
and rinse the wine glasses and make
a joke, and you leave the minutest
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.

* * *

On Saturday McGyva, Snicky, and I met up with a co-worker's of his, along with his wife and 3 yr-old son for a little impromptu lunch. The guys are volunteering on a science project at a nearby high school and decided they would treat themselves, on the last Saturday of this long, ongoing project, to a leisurely lunch at the local fancy-pansy hamburger joint. It was the first time I had met this couple and during conversation I found out she had been formally trained as a pastry chef. She revealed, however, that it wasn't a career she decided to pursue because, as she humorously put it, "once pastry chefs accomplish everything they need to in the field, they then go off to do bizarre stuff, like the entire cast of Star Trek glazed on cakes and such." They began to tell us about the loopy world of chefs and this led to a most entertaining reading recommendation: Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,by Anthony Bourdain.

McGyva picked the book up for me that night and I delved right in. Despite the slightly scandalous and downright risque turns the book takes, turns that are bewildering and amusing, it's his recollections of the food, his descriptions of different ingredients and tastes and smells that make this, pardon the pun, a delectable read.

* * *

When I was 17, I briefly flirted with the possibility of becoming a chef. I attended a class at the Cordon Blue when I was living in Paris. I had never been that much into food before then, having been dragged to restaurants by my gourmet-wannabe-but-truly-gourmand stepfather. Dinners at the Moulin de Mougins, where we went while spending time in Cannes, or at the Tour d'Argent in Paris, were pretty much wasted on me at that time. Still, that course at the Cordon Blue opened my eyes to the complexity of preparing something that nourishes and brings pleasure to others. Watching that chef reveal that there was more to swilling mixed ingredients from a boiling pot over a slab of venisson made me feel that this was an ancient, arcane trade filled with tricks and caveats, an alchemy of sorts, entrusted into the hands of those who mastered the speed of knives and harnessed the potency of fire.

I realized, though, that I liked it all by association. I liked to observe it all happen, and while I definitely enjoyed the end result, I wanted to cook whenever I felt inspired. I didn't think I could churn out meal after meal, day after day. It wasn't my passion and my calling.

Still, I understand Bourdain's joy describing several foods. I, too, remember my first oyster. I remember we were spending time on an island off the coast of Rio, where I spent many vacations during my childhood. One of our family friends, momentarily seized by a great idea, disappeared into the nighttime beach armed with a screwdriver, a block of wood, and a small bowl, and brought back a few small oysters. He proudly set them on ice and left a little salt and limes on the side. Most of the adults in the room balked at them as if they were gobs of phlegm. Our friend picked a shell up, squirted some lime juice on it, and slurped it off the smooth shell. His face lit up with an expression of rapture. "Want to try one?" he asked me, offering me the tray. It looked ghastly. But I was intrigued. So I braced myself, not sure if it was daring or curiosity that prompted me, and at a mental count of three slurped my oyster down.

And it was exquisite: a taste of the sea and something more so unique I wanted another one to help me define it.

Since then I have had oysters served over large ice platters at Brasserie Stella, near where I lived in Paris, or here in Boston, where a New England variety can be sampled at McCormick & Schmick's. But whether they are just as good, better, or not as delicious, they are held up against that first taste...

Poetry Friday

There used to be an old building on Siqueira Campos, Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro, where it seemed most ballet schools, seamstresses, and dusty vinyl record shops resided. The gatekeepers to this vertical Babylon of Carioca life were the elevator men and women whose main jobs were making sure the zigzag of metal doors did not unfold on a last-minute patron and pressing numbered buttons on a panel. It was a delightful anachronism in a furious city. I wonder if they're still there?


The Dignity of Ushers
by Al Maginnes


Their authority did not unfold
from ironed white shirts and thin ties
or from the funereal seriousness that struck
their acne-splashed faces but because
they stood heir to our native faith in light.


So we followed the thin white waver
of beams they pointed down aisles
to seats we never thought of refusing.
It was the first job I wanted,
especially after birthday outings


far from home showed me the glowing
outfits worn by big-city ushers, their get-ups
a blend of doorman and military dictator,
as gaudy and fine as the plots
of movies my Saturdays were swallowed by.


None of us knew, as they took us
into the artificial light of the cinema,
that they walked the path of the pin setter,
the blacksmith or elevator operator,
professions reduced to curiosity


by wandering time. Only in the quick steps
of floor salesmen, the slim backs of hostesses
bringing us to our tables, do they remain,
the artful flutters of their flashlights lost
in dark we are left to find our own way through.

Happy Friday, everyone!

Poetry Friday

The Heart's Archaeology
by Maudelle Driskell

On some fundless expedition,
you discover it beneath
a pyracantha bush
carved from the hip bone
of a long-extinct herbivore
that walked the plains on legs
a story tall. An ocarina of bone
drilled and shaped laboriously
with tools too soft to be efficient
by one primitive musician
spending night after night
squatting by the fire.
No instrument of percussion:
place this against your lips,
fill it from your lungs to sound
a note winding double helix, solo
and thready calling to the pack.

Happy Friday, everyone!