The Art of Fatherhood

All good fathers have certain things in common: they listen, are consistent, show affection, and support their offspring in ways both financial and moral. But what makes a good father unique is his art, that skill which makes him different from other dads. It's the habit that is immediately called to mind in fond exasperation when his kids are alone and talking about him, like the scene the "Christmas Story" when a lug nut lost in the snow calls forth the Art of Swearing, as perfected by Ralphie's father (played by Darren McGavin.)

My father in law, for instance, was a Gauguin of Grass Seed. My husband and his sibling remember seeing their dad, an intellectual man with PhD's in both chemistry and pharmacy, moving slowly around their New York lawn, different varieties of grass seed pooled in a Frisbee that he used like an artist's palette. A little fescue in this spot, a little bentgrass there, a little fertilizer spread meticulously on top. BT's front yard was a testament to the tablespoon by tablespoon care he lavished upon it.

As for my dad, he excels at the Art of the Long Distance Drive. There is no distance too vast nor destination too inconvenient nor route too complicated for him to say no to a road trip. With his travel mug full of coffee, some of my mom's meatloaf sandwiches wrapped in wax paper on the passenger seat, and a country music tape  to pop into his cassette player, my father would probably set off for Mercury without a second thought, perfectly content to be on the open road (as long as he could time it so as to miss rush hour on Mars.)  Our oldest daughter will be attending summer camp 3,000 miles away from us this summer, but only a few hours' drive from my parents' house. I think we were both reassured when I reminded her, "If Grandpa hears you sneeze, he'll pop in the car right away to drive four hours to hand you a box of tissues."

During my college years, my dad always came solo to pick me up in May to drive me home for the summer. Those long, hot, boring car rides with my dad down the Schuylkill Expressway and through the states of Pennsylvania and New York don't deserve to be called some of the nicest memories of my childhood-to-adulthood transition, but indeed they were. 

I was usually exhausted, enervated from the semester and finals, nervous about whatever summer job awaited. But it was always comforting to shoot the breeze with Dad for six straight hours, talk about school, the places we wanted to visit, what was happening with family and friends and neighbors. I’ve read child-rearing books that recommend you have your serious talks with your kids while driving – no one is looking directly at each other, and if the conversation speeds up or slows down there’s no awkwardness, you just blame the traffic.  At a point when I was creating an independent adult life in fits and starts, there was comfort in knowing that until we pulled off the NYS Thruway,  I was totally under the care and protection of my dad.

My meager offering to Dad, in return for his 12 straight hours of driving, was always a mix tape for him to keep. I played him all sorts of stuff that didn't stick, from The Blue Nile to U2 to the Housemartins, but when I brought him  The Blasters' Hard Line, we bonded over the rockabilly twang. Here's "Marie, Marie," some of the glue that holds us together despite all the miles between us.

Here's to my dad,  and to all the others out there who are proud to practice the Art of Fatherhood.

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.

Friday's Music Moment: Procrastinating Do-Gooder Edition

This is it. If you haven't finished your holiday shopping yet, then what are you doing reading my blog? The thronging crowds and snappy clerks await!

Unless…I have a better idea for you.  One that truly embodies the spirit of the season, and helps needy kids to boot. It makes you look like a generous do-gooder, which I know you are, not to mention a supporter of groovy new (and sometimes old) music - that's what brings you to Friday's Music Moment every week, right?

Carolyn Said of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a story last week about some young musicians and their friend Tyler Hester, a ninth grade English teacher at a charter high school in Richmond, CA. It's the kind of school where the library "consists of about 500 dog-eared paperbacks housed in a former bathroom," according to the article, the kind of place where even if you HAD a love of reading, you'd be hard-pressed to find a book with which to indulge it.

The musicians, Jack Conte and Nataly Dawn, have a huge-on-Youtube band called Pomplamoose, and they decided to help their college buddy and his students by encouraging their 200k plus YouTube fans to donate books to the school. In return, donors get a free download of Pomplamoose's latest album.  The response has been phenomenal, with donations to the school coming from all over the world. As of this writing, 7,354 donors have given 9,898 books and counting. It's been so successful that they've expanded beyond the original school site to donate books to public schools all over Richmond, a city where only 55% of students test proficient in English at the end of elementary school, and where in some schools 99% of the student population is poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price lunch.

Check out Said's article for the full story, but suffice it to say that tales like this refute all the nasty rumors about members of the Digital Native generation being apathetic and me-centered. I'm kind of intrigued too by this whole phenomenon of a band that exists only on YouTube. Do they even tour? Do they even have to? Evidently they made their mark when Hyundai bought their jingle for a car ad, but since I pretty much never have a chance to watch TV this time of year I haven't seen it - I apologize if everyone in the world is already sick of Pomplamoose.

As for me, I want to hear more than just the snippets of "Deck the Halls" in the video below, so I donated a couple copies of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou to the school. Why not pour yourself a nice eggnog, choose a book or two to donate in someone's honor, and spend the rest of the day listening to your new Pomplamoose Christmas album?

Happy Holidays to all my readers - thank you so much for making Normalarkey a part of your week. It's the best present I've had all year (I mean, besides the Jean Nate and the Christmas Tree sweater.)

Holiday Drama

I'm so looking forward to Christmas this year. It will be the only day in December not entirely consumed by children's theater performances.

Let me back up. Because we apparently have a family tradition of gettin' it on in March, the month of December is already full of birthday celebrations in my family: my mother, my late father in law, my sister. The creme de la creme birthday, of course, is the December 25 birthday I mentioned in last week's Swedish music moment. We celebrate the child's saint's day, her school birthday party, her regular birthday party, and of course the whole of Christmas day we veer from candy canes to birthday cupcakes and back. One of my favorite family pictures is of her at age two, sleeping face down and diapered butt up on the carpet at about 4 pm on Christmas afternoon, felled in her tracks by a sugar low.

But all that was manageable, until the children discovered The-a-tuh. Now they sing in choirs and take ballet twice a week. The youngest has the drama bug and an enviable comic delivery to back it up. As the terrible anti-stage parents we are, my husband and I frequently beg them to drop one of the activities, to which they say "FAME! I wanna live foreh-ehver!" and then pirouette on top of a cafeteria table with a multi-culti cast bobbing and weaving in the background.

Come December, every one of those performance programs wants to do a special show. There's the church choir show, which has many titles but always one theme: stop spending so much money on Christmas. There's the school play in which, this year, the youngest daughter plays Mowgli in the Jungle Book, a role she began rehearsing since before they even cast the show. And there's the Nutcracker, of course, four performances over two days at a real theater with ticket prices to match. Each separate activity has mandatory dress rehearsals, almost all of which conflict with another mandatory rehearsal for another performance discipline. 

Back before I had kids I loved to sample the many wonderful live performances in the Bay Area that mark the holiday season: the Smuin Ballet's Christmas show, the singalong Handel's Messiah at Davies Symphony Hall, or the Oakland Interfaith Choir gospel performance. Then a few years back I realized the biggest herald of the holiday season's arrival was not Santa at the end of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, but the sustained appearance of my own bitchy short-temper. That's when I had to accept that there simply weren't enough hours in the month, and something had to give. I didn't want that thing to be me, set out on the curb like a discarded Christmas tree by my own family.

So now the only holiday shows I see include my children in the cast list. 

I'm not complaining, really. I tear up predictably and repeatedly during every single performance, something that never happened at the professional shows, and I can waltz backstage with insouciance (ditto.) But I do miss the days when all the actors on the stage didn't silently mouth the lines along with the one person who is supposed to be speaking them (but usually isn't.) I'd give my eyeteeth to see a show where no one is waving at intervals to a grownup seated in the audience. Or turning to look at the back of the stage just when it's time to deliver their one line.

On December 25th it all comes to a screeching halt - the theater gods just can't schedule a show for that day. I plan to sit back and let my sore, reddened palms rest for a full 24 hour period. 

Of course, that was also my plan on Thanksgiving 2003, and we all know how that turned out. Our kids and their friends wrote, rehearsed, designed programs and costumes, and staged the famous "Thivifest 2003" ("Thanksgivingfest" being a bit of a challenge for a second grader to spell, and also less catchy.) I won't say it would have benefited from editing, but it made the Oberammergau Passionspiele seem like a one-act play.

On second thought, better lay in the fixings for a couple extra pitchers of my go-to holiday cocktail, the Poinsettia. If my hunch is right, Leroy Johnson and Coco Hernandez will be stopping by to sing backup, and I'll need to be prepared.

Friday's Music Moment: Swedish Edition

For 51 weeks of the year, we run a Hapa* household. Yorkshire pudding for dinner one night (mmm, bland!) and Egg Flower Soup the next. One of us is really excited about the upcoming royal wedding, and the other always wants to know where you went to college. 

But the week of December 13 each year, we embrace our non-existent Swedish roots. 

It started exactly 10 years ago, when our youngest daughter was born almost a month early, on Christmas Day. (Yes, Virginia, there is an anesthesiologist who looks an awful lot like Santa when you're in back labor.) She shares a name in common with St. Lucia, the patron saint of Sweden whose big day is December 13th. So with the prodding and guidance of her Swedish godmother, and to counter the lousy timing of her birthday, we have turned St. Lucia Day into an adopted family holiday.

The biggest marker of the day is baking of the Lucia Crown - a two-story braided bread made with saffron. Here's the no-fail recipe we use - the key is really good powdered saffron, so spring for it. Stud it with candles, sing "Happy Name Day to You!" and shower the kid with gifts (this year lots of Harry Potter and art supplies,) and you got yerself a holiday. We like the bread so much we make it again for Christmas morning, which is probably not allowed in the Swedish rule book, but they're an affable people so maybe they won't mind.

In looking for this week's Music Moment, then, I wanted to stick with the Sweden theme. I had hoped to bring you Robyn singing "Konichiwa Bitches," which includes some handy tips on how to organize your body parts, but my parents put some stupid parental control thing on my computer and I can't access it anymore because it has "swear words." Oh, wait, I'm the parent who did that. And I've forgotten the password and there seems to be no way on earth to recover it. Don't you hate that?

So I went a bit further afield to bring you the youthful Lykke Li singing "I'm Good, I'm Gone" from what looks like a school bathroom where she stashed two shoe-gazing Nordic musicians during second period. Now, I've seen four different acoustic versions of this song and in every one her voice is this strong, hypnotic, and distinctive; only the instruments change. This is the spoons, soap dispenser, and toilet flushing version, not to be confused with the megaphone, Robyn handclaps, and tinny transister radio version. 

"Yeah, I'm workin' to make butter for my piece of bun" - hope this weekend your piece of bun is a morsel of Lucia bread!

* white + asian = Hapa. Check it out at http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hapa.

Things I Do Not Want for Christmas

It's that time of year…actually for my husband it won't be that time of year until 4 pm on December 24th, but other people may do Christmas shopping prior to the moment when Santa is already hovering over the Czech Republic. With that in mind, I've come up with a helpful list of things to not bother yourself with buying for me. Please. 

(It must be said that none of the items on the following list have ever come from my husband, who, once he gets started, is an excellent gift giver. This were presented by ex-boyfriends, a boss with anger management issues at a humiliating temp job, and badly misinformed Secret Santas.)

1. If it is an appliance that will be used to prepare a meal for the gift-giver, that’s not so much a gift as a lien on my future (limited as it is) free time. How about giving yourself the espresso maker and fixing me a nice latte?
2. A Jean Nate gift set, picked up at the drug store when you were grabbing bandaids and an extension cord. Not only does the scent smell like loneliness, but it tells the recipient that, to the giver, they’re about as important as shaving cream or gum.
3. A gift basket filled with smoked cheese that has the consistency of plastic. I don’t eat cheese tubes and stale crackers during the other twelve months of the year; why do you think I will make an exception in December?
4. Anything advertised in a chain jewelry store commercial as “a sure-fire way to win her heart.” It won’t win my heart, but break it. If I want cheap sentimental jewelry that makes me look like I’m just counting the days til Junior Prom, I’ll shop at the Jean-Nate-selling drug store.
5. Clothing stenciled, embroidered, or beadazzled in holiday themes. I love Mrs. Cranston, our septuagenarian neighbor who has a themed top for every holiday, including Arbor Day. I’m just not ready to be her yet.
6. Holiday sheet music that reminds me, again, that I have let nine years of diligent piano study go completely down the crapper. I can plink out Jingle Bells with my two pointer fingers, and that will just have to be enough.

Friday's Music Moment: I Should Get Up by Teddy Thompson

Even before the lead story of  "here's actual film footage of people being trampled in the pre-dawn hours at an overlit Wal-mart on Long Island in their rush to buy $25 Black Friday Xboxes" became a fixture on the evening news, the idea of waking up at the crack of dawn to shop on the day after Thanksgiving intimidated me. I'm an early riser by nature so it's not the time; it's the addition of a layer of competition on top of the tedium of shopping that holds me back.

I know there are people, and by "people" I mean women, and by "know" I mean I'm related to them, who enjoy entering a store just to see what grabs their eye. They come home with beautiful things to adorn themselves, their homes, and their family, serendipitous finds at great prices. 

Not me. I shop like a man. I have a list, and I only want what's on it, and I want to spend the minimum time necessary to find it. It appeals both to my sense of organization and latent frugality, and by "frugality" I mean cheapness. I find that if I'm in a store, I discover entire new categories of things to want, like embellished t-shirts and seasonal placemats and shiny candlesticks. These are things I wouldn't even had considered pining for if I'd just had the good sense to stay home, and now I'm taking on extra work to pay for them.

Still, there's something about sitting out Black Friday that makes me feel un-American. Especially now when the economy still just crawling along, it's practically an act of patriotism to go out and make an impulse buy. The song for today, a live version of "I Should Get Up," by Teddy Thompson (at what looks to be a very hot and steamy 2006 Cambridge Folk festival - sorry about the shirtless guy at 2:58)  pretty neatly summarizes my ambivalence towards Black Friday: "I should get up, I should get out, I’m sure there's something I can't do without," he sings. But then he just stays on the stage, singing some more. At no point does he open his wallet.

It might be different for me if I lived closer to my brother and his wife. My sister-in-law is an inveterate Black Friday shopper who, along with her sisters, has a holiday tradition of hitting the stores and getting home again before the families even wake up, with time for a coffee in between. With Shelley as the wise-cracking tour guide and elbow thrower, I could probably hack it.

Ah. But I do have a saving grace. I am the poster child for online shopping. Not only is it a convenient way to avoid using my keyboard for actually writing, but if I gaze only at the center of the screen and not at the "you might also like" panes flanking it, I can have my shopping done in no time.

I should get up, I should get out, I should google "youth fleece slippers size 7." Hope your weekend is full of great value, friends…

Giving Thanks for Crud

It's easy to spend Thanksgiving week being grateful for food, shelter, family, health. I am grateful for those things, after all. There were plenty of reasons to rejoice in Normalarkeyland during 2010: all the relatives sitting in various boughs (and the trunk) of the family tree who had been laid off found good work again, our children are healthy and happy, we have enough money for groceries, and an X-ray revealed that our dog’s frequent bladder infections are not the result of anything congenital.

It's just that it sometimes seems too easy, that last Thursday in November, to take a moment and appreciate the things that cast life in the rosy orange glow of a Norman Rockwell painting. I'm going to suggest that if there’s a Hallmark greeting card saying what you’re thinking, you may be taking the easy way out.

That's why this year I'm trying hard to give thanks for crud.

By crud I mean that stuff that comes at you when you already feel like you're an aging prizefighter against the ropes with an eye sealed shut by your own blood. From one coast to the other, up and down the blue and red states and oblivious to collar colors, the past two years have been full of that particular brand of crud. The past two months have been particularly full of it, especially as regards children in my life. 

In May, a dear friend of mine in another city began an adoption journey, through a foster-to-adoption program that matches wannabe adoptive parents with babies born to parents who, for any number of reasons, are unable to care for them. The prospective parents go through all sorts of special training and education to prepare them for the particular difficulties, both physical and psychological, that such children may face. Family reunification is the main goal, but program participants know there is a decent chance that they will move from foster to adoptive parent status in the end.

My friend’s new baby came home to her at two days old, born five weeks premature, and my friend got her through those awful first three months of sleeplessness and explosive poopy dipes and inscrutable cries. By her fourth month, Baby Girl was at the top of the charts for every benchmark and my friend, delighted, began calling her Gordita – little fatty. Whenever I called, I could hear the heaven-sent sound of gurgling baby and adoring new Mom. I did the mental equivalent of sticking my fingers in my ears and saying "lalalalalalalala" whenever my friend, who was powerless to not fall in love with the little girl, cautioned that her chances for adoption were still tenuous.

Then at five months, Social Services called. A very young relative had stepped in, and Social Services decided that she would be the better guardian for Baby Girl. So last week, after writing out the daily schedule – “I wrote in that I read to her three times a day,” my friend told me, “even though I don't always,”- my friend stood in the busy hallway of a vast and sterile government building and said goodbye to Baby Girl. Then she got into her car and listened to the sound of her heart breaking.

I was still absorbing that news when a family in our elementary school community suffered every parent’s worst nightmare – a ten year old son running around with his buddies on the sports field one moment, unresponsive on the grass the next. He’d had a stroke – a stroke, in a 5^th grader – and has been hospitalized ever since. As word of the boy's plight has spread, it seems that everyone in the surrounding three counties knows the family somehow. He's doing better each day, inspiring everyone with his tenaciousness. But he faces a long road to full recovery.

I have spent a lot of tearful hours trying to figure out what possible good could be coming of this particular pile of crud, of these unfair and horrible events. Last week in my lefty liberal Episcopal church the liturgy, which I am the first to admit veers into hippie-dippy land on occasion, said “we give thanks for those moments that remind us that we are not in power.” Being grateful to realize we’re not in control? As a person who refers to her to-do list 7,893 times per day, I had to sit with that.

I got my first lesson in how to mine the gold from the mud from my friend, in the week between learning that her baby girl was leaving and the actual hand-off. She told me over the phone, “I’m devastated. But the blessing in all this is that I got to have this miraculous creature in my life for five months. ” Mom and Baby Girl changed each other, and no matter what happens they will always share a connection, in ways that may take a lifetime to comprehend. And as my friend is the first to insist, the relative who is stepping in to take care of her cousin’s child is doing what we all want to do – keep our families together and intact. “Her heart is in the right place,” my friend says. And having tested hers, my friend knows she is ready and able to mother any child who comes her way.

The trying times can also remind us to value our community. Our friends with the sick son have been using CaringBridge, a social network that lets them post updates from their boy’s bedside for all their friends. It also enables their friends to post messages of encouragement and, apropos of a ten year old boy, whatever fart jokes we can find on the Internet. As of this writing, over 9,000 visits have been made to the site. That's nine thousand tiny chances for this family to know that they are loved, supported, cared for. I wouldn't for a minute suggest that this family would trade their healthy kid for those reminders. But for me, there's something tremendously reassuring about watching the CaringBridge visit counter rise each day, a visible sign of the strength of our little village and our determination to do whatever we can to support the boy's recovery.

So this year, in addition to being grateful for all that's good, I'm going remember the things gone wrong or that seem unfair. And I'll try to be just as thankful for them and the lessons they teach us, whether or not we’re ready to learn.

Friday's Music Moment: Cuts You Up by Peter Murphy

It's a point of pride to me to have a good iPod playlist at the ready for every holiday. Some are easy - just load up on the U2, Pogues, and Sinead for St. Patrick's Day, the Neville Brothers and Kermit Ruffins for Mardi Gras, and Run DMC for Christmas. (You don't believe me? You've obviously never heard Christmas in Hollis.) And you have to update it every year to account for the new stuff. Refining the playlist is a Sisyphean task I relish.

Halloween's a bit tricky. You want fear, yes, but not so much that you drive away the children.  My playlist has the movie themes from Jaws and the Exorcist and Friday the 13th, which the kids largely ignore but which always manages to freak out the escorts. And you want sweet too - all those treats, after all. I have "Sweet Caroline" (the Glee Cast Version) and "Candy" ( Iggy Pop and Kate Pierson) and "Scooby Snacks" (Fun Lovin' Criminals.) Anything with "Ghost"  or "Devil" in the title works; "Pretty Ghost" by the BoDeans, "Devils and Dust" by Bruce Springsteen, and "Little Ghost" by the White Stripes.

After that, you have to go straight Goth, and for that you have to turn back the Tardis to the 1980s. Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cult, Ministry, Gene Loves Jezebal, Dead Can Dance. This song by former Bauhaus lead singer Peter Murphy is one of the tracks on my Halloween Play List that I listen to all year long, and not just because in 1990 I used to tuck my mock turtlenecks into my pants just like him.  It's an excellent song, 365 days a year. What is it that cuts you up? Peter Murphy's cheekbones, obviously.

I still have a couple of days to fiddle - what are the must-have songs on your Halloween playlist?

A Halloween Parenting Tip

The first Halloween we ever spent as parents was when our oldest daughter was eight months old. Eight months is that time of a baby's life when you sometimes fail to overcome the temptation to burrow your nose into your baby's neck and inhale all those soon-to-be-outgrown smells of powder and milk and innocence. Completely bald and with big blue eyes, our girl was chubby in all the ways a baby should be, with dimples on her elbows and crease lines on her mid-thighs.

I'd sent away for a little costume for her, a zip-up onesie with a hood that would make her look like a lamb. I probably spent more on that outfit than on all the other Halloween costumes she's worn since. October 31 dawned dry and sunny, and we decided to try the costume on in the morning and take some pictures to send to her grandparents back in New York. We pulled it up over her bulky diaper and plopped her between two fat orange pumpkins on the front lawn. Then I reached over to pull the hood on, so that she had two furry black lamb ears on top of her head.

"Oh my god," my husband and I said, almost simultaneously. She was the cutest baby that had ever been conceived and produced by anyone, in the history of mankind. My husband said, "I'm getting the car." He didn't need to say what I already knew; this child needed to be shown off. The universe demanded it.

We stopped at the coffee shop first, two parents with smiles like jack o'lanterns as strangers told us how cute she was and chucked her on her pillowy cheeks. A few laps up and down the main commercial drag in our little section of Oakland proved insufficient to gather all the praise that we felt was our daughter's due; we needed to go further afield.

It was back to the car for a meandering drive towards Berkeley. We'd only lived in the East Bay for a year at that point and there were still pockets of neighborhoods we hadn't explored. When, in the distance, we saw an orange balloon floating in the middle of a park, we stowed the car and made a beeline for it, holding Lamb Baby before us like a holy relic.

The grass was rutted and muddy, but all we saw was the frolicking dogs that our daughter greeted with squeals of excitement.  They weren't selling any food, but we'd just eaten at the coffee shop so it wasn't an inconvenience. Besides the single orange balloon, decorations were sparse, but we were hopped up on Essence of Lamb Baby anyway. I had a passing moment of wonder at why so many of the festival attendees were dressed as hippies or hobos, but that just meant more attention for the one fleecy baby in the crowd.

In fact, such was our excitement at the novelty of our situation that it took upwards of twenty minutes to realize that the attendees of the little gathering in Berkeley were drunk, high,  homeless, or some combination of the three.

Daughter Number Two, I know your older sister can be bossy and officious sometimes, and that she has occasionally used your things without asking you. However, when you are both older and have some perspective, please thank her for breaking in your parents. Because of all the parenting lessons we only had to learn once, "Don't Mistake a Homeless Encampment for a Halloween Festival" has got to be the most important.

Domestic Horrors

With Halloween only days away, perhaps it was fitting that I woke my husband up from a dead sleep last night with shrieks of horror. "It's ok, it's ok," he whispered at me, "you're just having a bad dream." He patted me on the back twice and fell immediately back to sleep, satisfied he'd scared off whatever monsters had woken his wife up in the middle of the night.

He was too sleepy to notice that I was actually lying in bed laughing at myself. The nightmare?

I dreamed I was in my own kitchen, cleaning off the dinner table after a meal. My arms were laden with dirty dishes from wrist to shoulder, and the hot water was running in the sink, the microwave was beeping, and I was trying to open the dishwasher with my foot. Sitting in their respective seats at our kitchen table, my youngest daughter had her nose buried in a National Geographic Kids magazine, my older daughter concentrated on a book, and my husband was playing long distance Scrabble with his sister on the iPad.

"Hello? A little help here?" I said in the dream, the dishes clinking precariously in my arms. "Hello? Anyone notice that I need some help cleaning up?" They just kept reading as I hopped on one foot, kicking at the dishwasher door with the other. 

Finally, desperate to get them to put down their reading and notice me, I screamed like a B list actress, waking myself and my husband up in the process.

Forget some masked maniac at Camp WannaPeePee chasing me down with a silvery butcher knife as I try to run uphill through maple syrup without shoes. I've become much more constricted in my fears. Evidently having to clean my actual kitchen by myself while my actual family relaxes in front of me is the real  nightmare.

With this in mind I thought I'd revisit some beloved slasher movie killers and decide what I'd probably nag them about, you know, apart from the homicides.

• Jason Voorhees, Friday the 13th: I swear to God, Jason, if I find your ski mask on the floor in the front hall again, I am THROWING IT OUT. Do you hear me? It's your trademark? Well, if that were true I doubt you'd be so careless as to throw it on the floor where the dog will step on it.

• Freddy Krueger, Nightmare on Elm Street: Those were brand new sheets, Frederick. They still had the creases in them. If you were going to suck Johnny Depp down into a bed and expel him in liquid format, couldn't you have just waited until the old blue sheets were on the bed? THINK next time, please. 

• Chucky, Child's Play: Hammers, baseball bats, axes, air pumps. What do they have in common? These are all outdoor toys, young man. Take them back to the garage or yard where you found them, please.

• Michael Myers, Halloween: Do you think it's easy to get reliable babysitters who can drive and don't have such active social lives that they are busy every Saturday night? And now I bet Laurie will warn her friends not to work for us either. Pat yourself on the back there, buddy, because now your parents will never get a date night again. And guess who's going to suffer for that?

• Ghostface, Scream: That's what you're wearing out to dinner? Again with the black tatters? What's wrong with the jeans and button down shirt you just had me buy you at the Gap? Oh no, it's fine. But I'll remember this next time you tell me you need something new.

So be forewarned, if you are trick or treating in my neighborhood this Sunday: there's an Angry Mom on the loose, and she may be coming for you.