Misty Eyed Memorial Day Memories

You can keep your barbeques, your parades, and your sparklers. What really says Memorial Day to me is a large piece of sawdust sending shooting pains through my eye.

The Memorial Day Picnic of my childhood was epic. Living on one side of a driveway shaped like a capital "T", our little stretch of asphalt was the locus for an all-day party for the neighbors up and down Branford Road. It started in the morning when someone would show up to string a volleyball net across the driveway; meanwhile, kids knelt in their driveways with rolls of crepe streamers, tricking out their banana seat no-speed bikes.

By noon the grills were lined up in our driveway and people were showing up with folding chairs and dishes to put down on the long tables, jello molds and iceberg lettuce salads and bowls of pretzels. The Genesee Cream Ale keg was tapped right around the same time that the fire engines showed up, not to douse the roaring gas-fueled flames of the barbeques ("stand back, kids, this might jump a little!")  but to lead the kids around the block in a costume parade, streamers flying backwards off the bike. Truly, my dad's role as a volunteer fireman provided no end of perks for us.

We didn't have marching bands but whoever had a flute or a nose whistle would chime in, a cacophony of sound syncopated by the playing cards that the boys stuck in their bike spokes so the wheels would click-click-click with every turn.

By 2 pm the kids were back, the beer was flowing, the moms were laughing, and the volleyball was careening dangerously across the makeshift court. But the real action came when the sawdust pile was unveiled. Where my father found a 6 foot by 4 foot pile of sawdust standing three feet deep every year was and remains a mystery. But what it held was no mystery: coins, wrapped hard candies, lollipops, and plastic toys, all buried inside the sawdust pile by the grownups.

In the seconds before the whistle blew, we kids would line up with our toes on the square plastic tarp that held the pile, trying to plan a line of attack. But once the whistle blew it was kill or be killed, all of us diving in and feeling around for the goodies, quarters and nickels and Jolly Ranchers  and Bazooka gum that would set us up for the whole summer.

It usually took about 30 seconds of flailing before the first casualty. "Aaaagh! My eye!" someone would scream, staggering away with a chip of sawdust in one watering eye and looking for his mom with the other one. "Aaagh! Ouch!" followed in short intervals until pretty much all the kids were standing around pulling upper eyelids over lower to flush out the pain, sawdust clinging not just to eyes but to hair, shirts, and legs. Within a half hour everyone was back to normal, settling in for some serious socializing until way past bedtime.

If the firetruck was there to entertain the kids, I'm firmly convinced that the sawdust pile massacre was the main Memorial Day entertainment attraction for the grownups.

Here's a little scene from the Talking Heads movie "True Stories" that I always loved because it reminded me of the merry band of miscreants with whom I grew up on Branford Road. And the little girl in pigtails is a dead ringer for me at age seven. "I am the king of the world! The boss of the boys and girls!" May you have just that kind of Memorial Day weekend.

Garden Tips for the Hare-ied

It's the time of year when I gaze out onto my small vegetable garden and think, "What will I kill this year?" My little patch is pretty lame, compared to the verdant garden of my childhood. But it's not my fault; we had a secret weapon back then, one that I only fully appreciate now. 

I speak, of course, of the Davis Family Rabbits. 

When my older sister Sally got the first black and white Dutch rabbit – Powder, called Powdy for short – back in the early 1970s, we needed to keep them protected from upstate New York winters so harsh they used to make board games about them. (What? You didn't grow up playing "Blizzard of '77"?)

So Dad, an engineer and tinkerer extraordinaire, constructed a rabbit run from two by fours and metal mesh that ran the entire width of one of the garages, tucked right up against the cement wall. A divider in the middle made it possible for us to house more than one rabbit at a time, and each side of the hutch had a plywood box for bunny privacy. Eventually Powdy moved on and Daisy and Indy moved in, each taking their own studio apartment.

Underneath the whole kit and caboodle were The Trays. These were three sheet metal trays fabricated especially for us by a friend of Dad’s from Kodak, or maybe from golf, or from the Volunteer Fire Department. They were each about 5 feet long, three feet wide, and had a lip an inch high. Each Tray weighed about 40 pounds empty. Bunny business dropped through the straw-covered mesh into The Trays, and every couple of weeks we had to slide them out, carry them into the vegetable garden, and dump them.

Carrying the heavy, goop filled trays required extreme precision if you didn’t want their contents dribbling onto you like a bad horror movie effect. As the youngest and shortest child, I dreaded cleaning the rabbit cage. All my brother or sister had to do was shrug their shoulders an inch so their Tray end rose up, and it was all over for me. Hands, cuffs, shoes, legs – at some point every part of me has been hit by rabbit pee, much to the amusement of my family members. You'd almost think they did it to me on purpose.

On the plus side was the fact that over the years, our vegetable garden plot was so fertile that if you threw a seed in, it bloomed before it landed. We grew zucchini the size of those yellow bananas that tourists ride through tropical waters behind speedboats. Tomatoes like melons. Melons like basketballs.

I think that the secret to the Davis rabbit poop fertilizer was a practice that, in retrospect, seems like one of those things that could only have happened during the '70s, like kids flying around car backseats without seatbelts, or an African Print 70's pantsuit. See, we regularly asphyxiated the rabbits with gas fumes.

Yes, they were kept warm in the garage, but a lot of that warmth came from a Buick station wagon tailpipe that stood about 18 inches away from the hutch. Particularly in the winter, when it was de rigueur to run the car engine in the closed garage for 10 minutes to warm it up before Dad left for Kodak Park, those rabbits got a nice healthy dose of carbon monoxide poisoning each morning.

On the surface, I know, that sounds awful. But maybe it was the CO poisoning that accounted for the rabbits' freakishly long lifespan. The average rabbit lives 7-12 years. When Indy, the last survivor, was 12 years old, I left for college, my parents’ empty nest technically still occupied by rabbits. Freshman year, sophomore year, junior year – my weekly phone calls home inevitably ended with my dad saying, “And the goddamned rabbit is still alive.” My sister even remembers an inquiry from the University of Rochester, a scientist who wanted to examine our elderly rabbit, but I think she may have dreamt that. At any rate, when Indy finally died, my dad had the cage removed and dismantled before you can say "Watership Down."

Our neighbors now have a rabbit who is the sweetest being ever. I could ask them for bunny poop for the garden. But without the tailpipe emissions, I'm just not sure it would be the same.

School Lunches on Autopilot

Next week is spring break for our kids. We're staying in town and haven't planned much, but I'm as excited as if we were going to Hawaii for the week. Because I have five whole days off from making lunches.

Every morning as I pull out the lunchboxes I am reminded of what Dorothy Parker reportedly said whenever her telephone rang: “What fresh hell is this?” Some weeks I’m on a health kick, making sandwiches on high fiber high protein bread spread with soynut butter accompanied by fresh fruit, low-fat pretzels, and fruit juice. Other weeks it’s the path of least resistance: plain pasta with olive oil in a thermos, gummies (at least it says fruit on the wrapper) and a couple of Girl Scout cookies, alongside some chocolate milk. Whatever. I'll make them eat a banana when they get home.

In the morning I spend a lot of time crossing from refrigerator to pantry to microwave, stopping in the middle of the kitchen to think, sighing, trying to remember which girl likes pretzels and which one likes dried apricots, and then resuming the circuit. As a person who now packs an average of 40 lunches a month, I am awed that my mom found a simple formula and stuck with it, for three kids, for at least ten years.

The school lunches of my childhood were an object of envy, and not because they were gourmet. When you’re nine years old, the last thing in the world you want is a lunch that is different from every else’s, emitting garlicky odors or displaying shiny textures or unusual colors. In short: if you would pay top dollar to eat a particular dish at a top rated restaurant specializing in ethnic cuisine as an adult, it may as well be plutonium when it show up in a lunch box.  That’s why the lunches carried by the Davis kids were so darn right. They didn’t try to be anything but what we were: bland and middle class.

A sandwich, either peanut butter and jelly, peanut butter and butter, peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff (catching a trend yet?) or the cheese sandwiches that my siblings and I used to tease my mom about, as she unwrapped the bright orange squares from their individual cellophane wrappers. “Mmmmm, American Processed Cheese Food Product,” we’d say, reading the cheese packaging label aloud and careful to stay just out of swatting distance. “My favorite!”

A single serving size bag of Fritos nestled alongside the wax paper-wrapped sandwiches. My mouth still waters at the memory of their fatty, salty, corn goodness pressing rectangular tracks onto my tongue, as I savored them in the cacophony of the Council Rock Elementary School cafeteria. 

Next into the paper lunch sack went a Hostess Ho-Ho, which is where my siblings and I exerted some individuality. My oldest sister always ate hers like it was corn on the cob, slowing rotating it and nibbling through the hard chocolate exterior then the cakey layer, until she got to the vanilla cream inside. My brother, disconcertingly referred to as "Little Larry" even after he'd topped 6 feet, could put one away in a single gulp. And I liked to break little bits of mine off and pop them in my mouth, examining the strata of the rolled pastry cake as I went.

At the bottom of the lunch sack was the shiny New York state Macintosh apple. That went straight into the garbage.

I don’t recall envying anyone’s lunch, or ever trading parts of mine away. There was no room for improvement as far as I was concerned, and I never complained about monotony. Who’s stupid enough to complain about a Hostess Ho-Ho?

Don't bother telling me that my kids are old enough to make their own lunches; you know it, they know it, and I know it. But it's not a hill I'm willing to die on. The fact is that the mornings they make their own lunches are filled with trauma and tears and they end up packing a 100% starch meal, whereas if I pack the lunch the trauma and tears are at least accompanied by 50% protein and fiber. It's simple math.

Frankly, if I was clever enough to come up with a lunch formula that would last for a decade, as my mother did, I wouldn’t care if resembled the food pyramid or a food pyre. It would be enough to have the whole process on autopilot.

Clutter? No, my childhood.

When I first walked through the house we've lived in for eight years now, the owners had taped handmade arrow signs throughout the rambling downstairs. Past the peach-colored room with French doors and the biggest entertainment console I'd ever seen, down a dark hall past a laundry room and bathroom, signs said "Keep Going! Don't Give Up Yet!" I finally crossed through a barren storage room with rough concrete floors to see a door in the corner with an arrow beckoning and behind that: another narrow shelved storage area, and a wholly unnecessary second kitchen.

My dad's first reaction, when he saw the embarrassment of storage space in the new house compared to the snug bungalow from which we were moving, was to shake his head and say, "If you've got it, you'll fill it up."

I think of that response each spring when I enter the narrow storage space, determined to pare down its contents, and see my box of troll dolls sitting on the shelf. 

Constant companions through my elementary school years in the '70s, the five trolls - Herbert and Pinky were the parents, Hubert, Buttercup, and Daisy were their three same-sized kids - are still packed into a tissue box-turned-camper and surrounded by little cough drop tins containing their homemade wardrobes. My third grade teacher, Mrs. Blumberg, had a strict no-dolls rule for her class. But because we were suck-up good girls and she must have had too few of those, my best friend Kitty and I were allowed to bring in our respective troll families and line them up on the edge of the desk every day, their googly eyes bearing witness to the blatant favoritism. 

For two girls who were singled out as class leaders, Kitty and I sure fought a lot. We had a major argument nearly every day of third grade; by fifth grade we were no longer speaking. (No worries: that troll foundation proved enduring - even though she lives on the other side of the globe now, Kitty's still one of my dearest friends.) 

Trolls enjoying view of scenic Bar Harbor

Even if we fought, we at least agreed on our trolls. We spent afternoon stretched out on our respective bedroom floors, cutting scraps of fabric into tiny shirts and dresses and sewing clumsy single button closures on the back. That summer her family took me along on an epic road trip to Maine, and most of my souvenir pictures are close ups of the trolls, with lighthouses or lobsters or starfish fuzzy in the background.

At some point - probably around the first time a boy asked me to sit with him for the haunted house ride at Roseland Park -  I boxed them up, sealed the box with duct tape, wrote TROLLS on it and threw it into my parent's attic. Eventually they slapped a mailing label on the box and sent it out to California where my husband and I are raising two daughters. When the oldest one entered third grade, I pulled out the box, surprised to see that Herbert and Pinky were still nestled in the chaste matrimonial embrace in which I entombed them.

"Girls, here. I want you to have these. They were extremely special to me. Here, see all the cute little clothes I made?"

Within about an hour of surreptitiously watching the girls while pretending to cook dinner, I swooped in to rescue them. The trolls, not the daughters. Herbert NEVER wore the argyle vest made from the top of my dad's work socks, and anyone could see that Buttercup looked terrible in mauve. I packed up the box; the fact that the kids didn't protest was probably a sign that the relationship was never going to work out anyway.

Did I throw them out when I started this year's spring cleaning? Of course not. The box is back in the storage area. And I await the arrival of my grandchildren in twenty years with hope eternal.

The pull of going home

I'm going home this weekend - to see my mom and dad, catch up with my sister and brother, and see neighbors and friends in the town where I spent my first 18 years. I'll eat some bagels, visit the the local tavern with my brother, take my aunt out for a belated birthday lunch, and go to a big Family Camp reunion. I can't wait.

I'm leaving home this weekend - leaving Andrew and the girls, my own bed, my spazzy dog, and some  overdue warm California weather after a long winter. I'm missing a dinner party, neglecting my poor drowned garden again, worrying about leaving the kids who have been sniffling and coughing for a week straight. I'm dreading leaving.

Here's something about being a grown up that no one ever told me. As much as I adore being with my husband and children in the home we've made: it's pretty much the same amount that I miss being with my parents and siblings 3,000 miles away. It's not a deficit but a surfeit of love and longing. Maybe it's different if you live in the same area code as your parents, but maybe not; for people like me who were blessed to grow up in a close and loving family, there is always a pull to return, no matter how happy our adult lives are.

So my song for this week is a melancholy Teddy Thompson ballad called "Home" in which he has the whole situation nailed. As he explains in his lyrics, you go home to see your parents who will feed you, do your laundry, and fuss over you, and you love it. Right up until the minute when you're ready to go home again. I'll be heartsick missing my family while I'm home visiting my family this weekend, and just as soon as I'm back in Cali, I'll be wishing I could spend more time in New York.

Here's hoping that you feel at home wherever you are in the world this weekend, friends -

Purely musical

Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras, Carnival - all the eating, drinking, and partying came to a head on Tuesday night, in a big blowout before Ash Wednesday and Lent. Even if you're not Christian, there's something appealing around rolling around in your own appetites and urges for awhile, assured that a hard stop followed by a finite period of asceticism will wipe your transgressions clean and help you fit back into your pants. What's wrong with eating that whole box of Do-Si-Dos that the Girl Scouts dropped off, when three days later I'll only be eating kale?

As I am a great maker of resolutions and clean-wiper of slates, I look forward to Lent. As a kid, the quest to figure out what exactly I would do without for 40 days took up a lot of time in the weeks approaching Ash Wednesday. Would it be easier to give up chocolate or ice cream, or would my parents fall for it if I gave up cleaning my room? (Answer: no, and to my children: don't bother.)

My next door neighbor and best friend was a parochial school student and we spent afternoons lying on the yellow rug in my bedroom comparing religious requirements related to Lent so that we could cherry-pick the least onerous. Mary Beth had to eat fish on Fridays, but assured me that Catholicism let you off the hook on Sundays from whatever it was you'd given up, so you could fill up on chocolate or ice cream or cookies.  (And it is true that if you count Sundays between now and Easter, there are 46 days. Ain't nothing in the Bible about Jesus in the wilderness for 46 days. It specifically says 40.) Our Episcopal church was ok with the Friday meat, but we ate soup on Wednesdays and collected pennies for the poor. 

One year when I was about ten, our groovy hippie youth minister reminded us that you don't just have to give something up for Lent, probably because he realized that abstaining from Pop Tarts for six weeks didn't really bring his youthful charges closer to meaningful spirituality.  "Better you should take something on," he said. "Start to do something you've been meaning to do."

Ever since, that's my battle cry at Lent - taking on habits like "If it occurs to you to donate money to a charity, do it before you can change your mind," or "spend five minutes meditating before you start work every day." The discipline of taking on something new for 40 days has helped me to clear away the excuses and distractions, and creates new, intentional habits. This year my Lenten resolution is to take on a "device-free" period for a few hours every day - no smartphones, iPads, and laptops- so I can be more in the moment with my family. It's going to get very 2004 all up in here.

Speaking of simplifying, a few weeks ago we had the chance to see Nora Jane Struthers play a house concert at the lovely home of our friends Jonathan and Tiffany, and as funny, fresh, and musically talented as she is, what struck me most was the purity of Nora Jane's voice. No amplification, no fancy Xtina vocal embellishments, no dance moves. Just strong, clear, honest singing, like here in "Greenbriar County."

Sometimes all you really want is to focus on the basics, and save the Pop Tarts for another time. Here's to a weekend of good intentions, friends -