Free to Good Home

The first time I heard an urban-legend about a goldfish, the kind that survives for years beyond life expectancy, I was five-years old. We had a neighbor in Los Angeles named Josephine. She had a thick South African accent, called her husband “Lover” (Lovah) and did very theatrical things like wear all black and do a dance and sing as she sprinkled fish flakes into their goldfish's bowl, explaining to me that was why it lived so long.

“Goldy is impossibly precious, a carnival fish, meant to last only a fortnight and here she is, seven years later."

Just last week we had to find a home for Charming Baby’s goldfish (no name!) that he had for over a year. He romanticized that Fish was a baby caught in our Koi pond, but I seem to recall it was a feeder I bought for 15 cents to pacify him on one our trips to the pet store. First Born Prince had been amassing toads, frogs, salamanders, and turtles, always needing to stop for another aquarium, or crickets or meal worms. CB wanted his own pet to care for and somehow we ended up with one I swore wouldn’t make it past a fortnight.

I always expected Fish to be a floater when I walked into Charming Baby’s bedroom, but he would faithfully be there, swimming to the top of his tank any time I cast a shadow on his home. His behavior surprised me, more endearing than I cared to admit. The damn thing was supposed to die, not become yet another living thing for me to love and worry about.

When I told Charming Baby we couldn't move Fish to California with us, he announced that he was returning him to his family in the Koi pond. Before I could explain that would be sealing the pet’s fate, he scooped him up and ran to the pond and set Fish free.

We have only a few days left until the moving truck pulls away. I keep walking down to the back pond, hoping to see Fish alive and swimming to the surface for a feeding.

Valuables

We are supposed to make a list of our valuables, all items going on the moving truck worth over $100 dollars a pound.

I didn’t do this the first half-dozen moves of my adult life. I always felt we had nothing to declare except our children. As I walk around the house with my note pad I realize there is plenty worth cataloguing--art, antiques, the rug I bought in Istanbul, some of the furniture. I am going to dust off and wear my engagement ring and take my other keepsakes with me. The Professor has some heirloom watches from his grandfather we need to decide to claim or carry. Other than that, we are all set.

I mentioned on our way to New York that if the whole moving truck went up in flames, I’d be fine with it. I still feel that way. I like to imagine what I’d do with the check and free time. I hate to admit this, but I’d love to stick it in the bank and enjoy the freedom of not replacing the stuff. When the Professor reads this, he’ll wag his raised-in-an-apartment finger at me and proclaim he told me so. He loves that most of what we've spent time and money on you can't take with you.

If we had it his way, there wouldn’t be a stick of furniture or any walls that we owned. We’d travel and teach for the rest of our lives. I had to push for my bourgeois desires and brow beat him into buying a house. Now I am fantasizing about having no nest. Funny how we become like our partners. I read that couples start to look alike after being together for years. I don’t think I resemble a six-foot-five Jewish man, but I am glad I am starting to think like one.

Break These Chains

I was going to the gym the other day out of routine. It was sunny and breezy outside and I even had to push Lucky Bastard’s nose back into the kitchen as he tried to follow me to my car, wagging his tail, hoping for a hike. I drove all the way to the gym, parked my car and then said out loud to myself, “This is ridiculous.” I threw my car into reverse and headed directly back home.

Huck and I had one of our best hikes yet that day. I love the state parks here. Ithaca is so green this time of year and the trails were empty because school wasn’t out yet. What had I been thinking when my first action was robotic? I guess I wasn’t, just banging out my day as if they were all average and endless.

This weekend the Professor is taking First Born Prince to his final travel lacrosse game. It’s special in that it’s all weekend long and the team is staying at a hotel. Charming Baby wasn’t invited. FBP wanted a special father/son trip (that’s code for no little brother tagging along).

My youngest son asked if we could do something, too.

“Like what?” I immediately envisioned CB and me going to see the new Judy Moody movie and buying flip-flops at the mall (Huck ate his last pair).

“Camping!” What? If I did that, how could I obsess over my things-to-do list and have anxiety attacks about the impending move? How would I be able to drink too much coffee Saturday morning and get bitchy and have a good yell at my sweet baby?

I thought about how breaking my patterns of habit last week with the gym yielded new freedom and an awesome memory in my mental scrapbook. I booked a cabin for us in Treman State Park. They have cots, fire pits and little picnic tables. Our friends booked one, too, so we’ll have buddies there to hike, swim and make dinner with. I am so excited; I just may just leave my coffee pot at home.

Cornell Campus Club Reading List

I have definitely riffed on Cornell Campus Club for women before. The club is mostly a social organization, offering affinity groups and educational lectures, set up to help women who have been Shanghaied to this town meet friends with similar interests. I joined the book club, which meets regularly and every year they choose the reading list in advance. Since I am moving and busier than a politician’s PR agent, I cannot attend the potluck next week where all the book suggestions are discussed and selected, but I thought my blog followers, being of impeccable literary taste, would want to know what’s on the table for the upcoming year. I am v. excited to have my summer reading list penciled out for me! Please note, my writing mentor’s book, Cleaning Nabakov’s House is on the list. An excellent read! I can also vouch for The Help and The Glass Castle, and will tell you I was given Cutting for Stone from my mother-in-law who says it's a must read. I am starting it tonight. Enjoy!

Cornell Campus Book Club Book List Suggestions:

Started Early, Took My Dog - Kate Atkinson
For those who enjoyed When Will There Be Good News or have read other of Atkinson's terrific novels, Started Early, Took My Dog is the latest. It again features Jackson Brodie, this time in a story that collides with the stories of a security chief called Tilly, and an aging actress on the brink of disaster. Atkinson's writing blends of humor, wit and insight while facing the hardships and horrors of a violent and sometimes unexplainable world. Her gift for characterization, careful plotting, and well toned sentences make her novels mysteries that are rightly reviewed as good literature and are a pleasure to read. (384 pp.)

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
This is a classic, and for some of our group it may be a long-overdue revisit either as a reread or if you've seen Hitchcock's film version. I read it for the first time in high school but just re-read it and absolutely could NOT put it down. It's the story of a young girl who finds herself becoming the second wife of a wealthy man with a mysterious past and who must in a sense grow into a woman and learn to manage the house, the people and the secrets that she unknowingly takes on in marriage. The novel is taut, seamlessly smooth to read, and jam packed with beautiful descriptions, clever characterization, and page-turning revelations. (416 pp.)

The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life - Jasmin Darznik
Adult daughter Jasmin Darznik discovers by chance that her mother, Lili, lived a completely different life in Iran before marriage to her father, forced into an arranged marriage at 14 years old. The first marriage was abusive and Lili's father helped her divorce, but she had to leave her first daughter in his custody in Iran. Reviews say: "fulfills the highest ambition of the memoir as a genre: to tell a personal story that, by virtue of its honesty, sheds light on an all too universal truth," "beautifully recounted,"and "illuminates the complexity of Iranian women's lives as few books have ever done." (330 pp.)

Cleaning Nabokov's House - Leslie Daniels
"A comic woman-in-distress novel involving the literary master Nabokov and a country cathouse ... her out-of-the-box narrator is hilarious, chaotic, and surprisingly resourceful. Wardrobe-challenged Barb, who is inordinately fond of toast, loses custody of her kids in a vicious divorce... [Barb] discovers a hidden manuscript. Is it Nabokov's?... Daniels is warmly funny and audacious in this shrewd and saucy mix of family drama, gender discord, sexual healing, and high literature; a raucous yet sensitive tale of one quirky woman's struggle to overcome the lowest of low self-esteem to get motherhood and love right." (330 pp.)

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Many of us have read it before so we could concentrate on the themes it discusses. Was it the basis of the romantic literature that we now find sells most widely of any type of fiction? Also, we could tie it in with the latest movie version which has gotten good reviews. (352 pp.)

A City of Djinns - William Dalrymple
This book is classified as a travel literature. William Dalrymple is regarded to be a master at this genre. He won a prize for his Last Mughal. City of Djinns is an account of the author's year in Delhi, with his new wife who provides illustrations. It is part personal and part a history of the city. For those of us who will never visit Delhi and even for those who will, it should expand our experiences. I suggest that we could put this in the January slot and make Indian food. (350 pp.)

Fields of Glory - Jean Rouaud
This book represents a dialog between two generations seemingly far apart. The memories of World War I era veterans from the French lower Loire Valley are narrated from the perspectives of the grandchildren, whose initial boredom with the nostalgic stories from another era progressively become affection and understanding for the psychological urge to remember and be remembered. Prix Goncourt 1990. (168 pp.)

Dreams of My Russian Summers - Andrei Makine
Andrei Makine, born in Siberia in 1957, has written an ode to his French grandmother, a memorable account of life in Communist Russia as lived by the woman who gave him joy, comfort, and permission to dream of other worlds. Slowly, over the years, Charlotte reveals harsh truths to young Andrei - but always with a lyrical and dreamlike quality that makes reading this book feel as though you're inhaling pure, gauzy poetry. Prix Goncourt 1995. (256 pp.)

The Glass Castle - Jeanette Walls
(250 weeks on NYT bestseller list) Memoir: Life of a family with idealistic nonconforming parents. Both the good and bad aspects related with thoughtfulness, understanding and grace: Hard to put down. (288 pp.)

Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese
Anglo-Indian twins grow up at a charity hospital in Ethopia mid 20th C. Story of their family, lost parents, guardians, medical training and Ethiopian politics and war in rich, tapestry woven language. (Possible Ethopian meal connected with this). (688 pp.)

Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in a small Far West town of Fingerbone,which is set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. The author also wrote Gilead. (219 pp.)

American Lion - Jon Meacham
This is a biography of Andrew Jackson in the White House. (316 pp.)

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination - Elizabeth McCracken
In Elizabeth McCracken's memoir—a love letter to the child she lost and the devoted husband who suffered alongside her—McCracken displays her many talents. Her warmth, candor, crystalline prose, lovely imagery, and attention to detail bring her story to life. (208 pp.)

Finding George Orwell in Burma - Emma Larkin
In Burma there is a joke that Orwell wrote not just one novel about the country, but three: a trilogy comprised of Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Finding George Orwell in Burma is a lively combination of biography and armchair travel, as Larkin travels to all the places where Orwell lived and worked. (304 pp.)

Behind a Mask - Louisa May Alcott
For those who wanted to read a 19th-century American woman writer, but a far cry from her well-known domestic fiction. She made her living and supported her family by this sort of writing. It is a dark and ingenious study of deception and betrayal. My edition has an introduction by Doris Lessing. (108 pp.)

Private Life - Jane Smiley
Her latest work, it got a rave short review from the New Yorker, which called it masterly. A precise compelling depiction of a singular woman living near San Francisco with her astronomer husband about the turn of the 20th century. (416 pp.)

The Cookbook Collector - Allegra Goodman
Her latest novel, teaming with new life: a dozen characters on both American coasts, whose lives intersect in ways that she lovingly traces. We liked the book by her that we read a few years back. (394 pp.)

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family - Annette Gordon-Reed
An excellent non-fiction work that would help us know a lot more about a period of American history and a prominent American president, Thomas Jefferson. For this writer, the scandal was not what Jefferson did, but what historians did in scanting the evidence for it. (800 pp.)

The Island - Victoria Hislop
The Petrakis family lives in the small Greek seaside village of Plaka. Just off the coast is the tiny island of Spinalonga, where the nation's leper colony once was located—a place that has haunted four generations of Petrakis women. There's Eleni, ripped from her husband and two young daughters and sent to Spinalonga in 1939, and her daughters Maria, finding joy in the everyday as she dutifully cares for her father, and Anna, a wild child hungry for passion and a life anywhere but Plaka. And finally there's Alexis, Eleni's great-granddaughter, visiting modern-day Greece to unlock her family's past. (480 pp.)

Every Man Dies Alone- Hans Fallada
Fallada wrote this novel in twenty-four days in 1947, the last year of his life; he was addicted to drugs and alcohol, and had just been released from a Nazi insane asylum. The story is based on that of an actual working-class Berlin couple who conducted a three-year resistance campaign against the Nazis, by leaving anonymous postcards at random locations around the city. The book offers a visceral, chilling portrait of the distrust that permeated everyday German life during the war. Especially interesting are the details that show how Nazi-run charities and labor organizations monitored and made public the degree to which individuals supported or eschewed their cause. Ranked #2 bestselling in German literature in Amazon.com. (544 pp.)

The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver
Harrison Shepard, the product of a divorced American father and Mexican mother, spends his formative years in Mexico in the 1930s in the household of artists Diego Rivera; his wife, Frida Kahlo, and their houseguest, exiled Leon Trotsky. After Trotsky is assassinated, Harrison returns to the US settling down in Asheville, NC where he become an author of historical potboilers and is later investigated as a possible subversive by the McCarthy Committee. Fascinating, educational read. Good candidate for our January dinner because Harrison is the cook for the Riveras. Frida loves to entertain and eat. (507 pp.)

The Help - Kathryn Stockett
Jackson, Mississippi, in the early 1960s is a city of tradition. Silver is used at bridge-club luncheons, pieces polished to perfection by black maids who “yes, ma'am,” and “no, ma'am,” to the young white ladies who order the days. This is the world Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan enters when she graduates from Ole Miss and returns to the family plantation, but it is a world that, to her, seems ripe for change. As she observes her friend Elizabeth rudely interact with Aibileen, the gentle black woman who is practically raising Elizabeth's two-year-old daughter, Mae Mobley, Skeeter latches onto the idea of writing the story of such fraught domestic relations from the help's point of view. With the reluctant assistance of Aibileen's feisty friend, Minny, Skeeter manages to interview a dozen of the city's maids, and the book, when it is finally published, rocks Jackson's world in unimaginable ways. With pitch-perfect tone and an unerring facility for character and setting, Stockett's richly accomplished debut novel inventively explores the unspoken ways in which the nascent civil rights and feminist movements threatened the southern status quo. Look for the forthcoming movie to generate keen interest in Stockett's luminous portrait of friendship, loyalty, courage, and redemption. (464 pp.)

Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial – Janet Malcolm
"She couldn't have done it and she must have done it." This is the enigma at the heart of Janet Malcolm's riveting new book about a murder trial in the insular Bukharan-Jewish community of Forest Hills, Queens, that captured national attention. The defendant, Mazoltuv Borukhova, a beautiful young physician, is accused of hiring an assassin to kill her estranged husband, Daniel Malakov, a respected orthodontist, in the presence of their four-year old child. The prosecutor calls it an act of vengeance: just weeks before Malakov was killed in cold blood, he was given custody of Michelle for inexplicable reasons. It is the "Dickensian ordeal" of Borukhova's innocent child that drives Malcolm's inquiry. With the intellectual and emotional precision for which she is known, Malcolm looks at the trial—"a contest between competing narratives"—from every conceivable angle. It is the chasm between our ideals of justice and the human factors that influence every trial—from divergent lawyering abilities to the nature of jury selection, the malleability of evidence, and the disposition of the judge—that is perhaps most striking. A longer version of a fascinating article in the New Yorker earlier this year. (168 pp.)

The Great Outdoors

We just got back from the Adirondacks. The trip was part of my plan to live out the vignette in my head of giving my boys canoe trips and picnics beneath pine trees. A bonus is that I, too, got to experience the great outdoors, not just imagine what I saw in the Technicolor Yogi Bear cartoons of my youth.

It was everything I hoped it would be, minus the wrestling and whining at bedtime. Rather than pitch tents, I booked an upscale lodge. I will hike, sweat, get dirty and eat peanut butter and jelly all day long, but come evening time, I want a bubble bath, a glass of wine and a fish that someone else caught and prepared set down in front of me, preferably grilled.

I am not a princess, just someone who, given the choice, will pick the genteel accommodations built for city people traveling to the country. We stayed at Mirror Lake Inn in Lake Placid. It was lovely and even my boys appreciated all of the charm.

One of the other big spender things I like to indulge in is springing for the kids’ souvenirs. I tell them they’ll have to use their allowance so they choose carefully and then at the cash register, I whip out my wallet and say, “It’s on me!” I am sure they have figured this out, like Santa and other pretend animals and fairies that visit our home, but they humor me just the same.

First Born Prince spent almost an hour on the main street going from shop to shop, looking for a woodsy frame and a postcard of a canoe on one of the lakes to put in it, as his keepsake. He knew exactly what he wanted and we didn’t stop until we found just the right one. It was so sweet, like the time he picked out the little replica of Ellis Island to remind him of our family trip there, too.

Charming Baby chose a walking stick with “Adirondack Mts.” carved into the handle, which I sincerely hoped would be used for hiking and not as a weapon against his brother. This morning I saw him busy in his room, arranging the stick by his bedroom window where he has his current favorite things on display: National Geographic book on birds, drawing pad, and special pencil with left-handed gripper.

The years are flying by and I’ll be damned if you have to ask me twice to create these memories for them. At one point on one of our hikes, we stopped for a break and Charming Baby looked around at all of us, smiled and said, “This is so cool.” I knew what he meant. It had little to do with the mountains and rivers, although those gave what he was talking about a beautiful backdrop.

Is there a Stay-at-Home Mom guidebook?

Why do I envy women who can unapologetically be stay-at-home moms, satisfied with offering their families inspired meal plans and a laundry system that works? They are not killing themselves to validate their existence outside the home, always mumbling something about the class they are taking or small business they are starting. I guess it’s because they are not afraid of the answer to the question, “What do you do?” Or, they had a frontal lobotomy.

These women aren’t stupid or bored and seem to have a fulfilling existence. Martha Stewart built an empire showing us the meaning and importance of organizing our closets and making our own cookies. Who else but a housewife has the time to label garage shelves and store wreaths properly? Those of us who chose working in the home found ways to make it about more than just raising the kids--volunteering, throwing dinner parties and training for marathons. Even if it’s not sexy, it can be at least a little glamorous.

What happens when mom wakes up one day and decides she doesn’t care about the cupboards anymore? What happens when the kids are old enough to do their own laundry? We’ve been at it for a long time now and some of us cannot hide the stress-fractures anymore. I recently heard tales about a woman in an upscale suburb in Silicon Valley falling out of her family’s golf cart after a BBQ where she had too much to drink. Her husband just put her back in, waved good-bye and drove off.

Where there is a symptom, there is usually a disease. I like being at home, I want to be the one around after school and making dinner. It’s a fun challenge figuring out how to keep it all fresh. As we hit the doldrums of the stay-at-home mom career, we have to find ourselves somewhere besides the couch, mall or bottle.

I am trying to find that sweet spot—a place where my household is running smoothly but I am not ready to slit my wrists with a butter knife. I am one of the lucky ones in that I have a choice, but even with that, balance takes practice. At least I have the saving grace of really funny friends and a husband who thinks there are no right or wrong answers—only good questions.

I Need Yoga, or a Drink

I never really understood the Professor’s complaints about California until we moved away. He used to leave parties and say, “All people care about is the size of their butts and backyards.” I would roll my eyes, convinced that he just needed to have a drink and relax.

Of course, I got to the point where I would look around my neighborhood on trash and recycling day, sick to my stomach at all the waste bins lining the sidewalks. There was a time I got angry at the people driving huge SUVs, alone, to run their errands, burning fossil fuel, without a care in the world except how often they could run those suckers through the car wash. I would try to calm myself down by practicing the breathing I learned in yoga.

When that didn't work, I remember calling our friend and sage, Jon, in LA to complain about my anxiety. She pointed out that I wasn’t exactly riding my bicycle to the grocery store and I still shopped for crap at Target. I was buying plane tickets regularly, not innocent by any stretch. She encouraged me to get comfortable with my place on the spectrum and stop criticizing others. I wasn’t going to stop people from consuming so I had better just focus on my own footprint.

Living in Ithaca gave me a break from the stress of worrying about our planet for a while. In fact, I am probably the grossest consumer in the entire upstate New York region. I’m sure the artists, academics and Trustafarians aren’t impressed with us capitalists who earned our money the crude way. Only the families that have traded out urban living for the groovy rural college-town life truly understand my plight. The people who have arrived here through the ranks of art, academia or inheritance probably wonder how I can sleep at night.

My nerves are shot as I think about saying good-bye to all the incredible friends we have made, the nature and university we’ve enjoyed. Now I am the one grumbling as we leave parties, wondering about my own sensibilities. Sure I'm excited to get back to our friends and family and the beach, but I am giving up driving by local farm stands for a downtown that has a Maserati dealership on the corner. I think the Professor and I have finally arrived at a place where we realize it's not about us but up to us.

Loss, Flowers & Comfort

Last week my best friend’s father died from a stroke unexpectedly. She was there, miraculously in town visiting her family for Memorial Day weekend. In some ways I am sure that gave her solace. But there really is no peace when you lose someone so loved and cherished. Everyone who knew him, or knew of him, respected this man. He lived a life full of integrity and accomplishments.

His death is a loss not only to my friend, her family, and especially her mother, but also to many larger communities, including the field of marine biology. He was a humble, generous man, charming and funny, a highly regarded scientist, professor, musician, husband, father, grandfather and friend.

I imagined my friend’s mother’s home filled with flowers, like my mother’s was after my father’s death, so at first I didn’t send anything. Then it dawned on me that I was a product of a businessman’s family and that we express ourselves much differently than academics. Turns out I was correct—only her father’s doctor had sent a bouquet. Their friends and family were sending long, heartfelt e-mails, and setting up a student scholarship in her father’s name.

Finally I could be useful in the sea of pain I feared. I wrote a long e-mail and sent flowers. For some reason her mother wrote back to an old e-mail account that has been turned off for years. I would never have received her beautiful thank you note if Charming Baby hadn’t been screwing around with my computer over the weekend. My in-box was flooded with junk correspondence from the old e-mail address.

As I cursed sharing my Mac with a seven-year old, I weeded through it all before deleting anything because of my Type-A first-born neurotic tendencies. I now feel very blessed to have a busybody son and that I received 2,247 e-mails to go through.

I found my friend’s mom’s gracious words and a photo attachment. It humbled me that she took the time to photograph the flowers I sent and send it to me. She was able to illustrate for me how much she is going to miss him. “In 46 years we never ran out of things to share, even if it was just the fact that there was a steller jay in the bird feeder and the one who saw it wanted the other one to be able to see it too.”