Jubilee

My apologies, blogovians. I have been bad. Blame my kids. (There's no actual reason to blame them, no empirical data, so to speak, but blaming the kids is my default mode. It works.)

Anyway, I'm back. A bit worn out, however, from celebrating the Queen's Jubilee yesterday. What Queen, you ask? As did the lovely little girl behind the counter at Baum's Bakery. "THE Queen," I replied. "You know, Queen Elizabeth. She's been on the throne for 60 years!" The little girl was so impressed. "That is so cool! So, how do you celebrate a Queen's Jubilee?"

Silly girl. You eat cake. A $40 Baum's Half Lemon/ Half Chocolate Dobasch Cake (http://www.baumspastries.com/index.php/cakes/specialty-cakes/dobasch-half-and-half.html) which, I'll admit, looks a bit wonky on the website photo but is ecstasy encapsulated in six layers of delicate, moist cake, enfolded by delectable lashings of buttercream and fondant. And then you get the star-struck, lovely, silly girl to write "God Save the Queen" on it. And you combine it with a sandwich and salad buffet and a very last-minute gathering of somewhat mystified Baton Rougeans, and you watch BBC-America with the sound turned off so that you can all shout out questions like, "Good lord, who is that woman?" and "Wait, who sucked who's toes?", and you mix in lots of champagne, and there you have it. A respectable Queen's Jubilee celebration.

But not the best we've done, actually. Ten years ago we were living in Manchester and 7-year-old Hugh's primary school marked the occasion of Elizabeth's 50-year anniversary on the throne with a "garden party." Completely bowled over by the event, Hugh came home from school that Friday afternoon and--unbeknownst to us--invited all our neighbors on the street to a Garden Party that evening. Somehow, we got wind of the plans and were able to convince him to walk round and change the invitations to Saturday afternoon. Keith and I figured most of the neighbors would not come; the few who did, we were sure, would show up, smile fondly at Hugh, eat a small piece of cake, wink at us, and head home five minutes later. So the next morning I toddled down to the local bake shop and picked up a couple of small "Jubilee" cakes--simple single layer sponge cakes with fondant icing and a picture of the queen. We chilled a bottle of wine and made a pot of tea, and set aside 30 minutes.

That afternoon the neighbors poured in, all of them thrilled to be invited and massively ashamed that it took "the Americans" to whip Grange Avenue into shape and make sure that we observed the Jubilee properly. Gobsmacked, Keith and I ransacked the cupboards and fridge for snacks, party food, anything edible, really, and after our embarrassingly substantial wine and beer collection was completely drained dry, the neighbors began making periodic forays to their own kitchens to restock the liquor supply. By the end of that long, glorious, sunny, booze-soaked, cake-filled, amazing afternoon, we felt like we were honorable members of the British tribe. We moved to the U.S. just a month later--and coming back to Louisiana, in many ways we felt like ex-pats, far from home.

So, Happy Jubilee, Liz, old gel.  God save you, luv. You've been good to us.

Ick

Marple the Kitty has tapeworms, Cleaning Sarah informed me when I got home today.
"They were all over the chair, you know, the rocking chair that he sits in."
I'm confused. "But, how in the world, I mean, I thought tapeworms showed up in poop."
Cleaning Sarah is embarrassed. She doesn't like discussing bodily functions. Too much cleaning of other folks' toilets, I imagine. "Well, yeah, but you know, they crawl out of, well, you know, down there. . ."

Oh good lord.

Ick.

So in less than one week we've got Kitty Wimsey crapping in our bed, Ol' Dog Rowan vomiting twelve times one morning before I left for work and another five times after, and now feline tapeworms.

I'm thinking maybe a goldfish.

Maybe not. I remember goldfishes. We had a series of them, plus beta fish, when the boys were little. You start with all that enthusiasm, a fresh bowl, a little filter, a couple of plastic plants and a castle, plus the fish. You end up with lots of slime, a horrible odor, and a dead fish. Which was the whole point of it all, from Hugh's perspective. He loved our fish funerals. He never actually actively killed a fish, but he certainly thought they were far more interesting dead than alive. Of course, he had a point.

So maybe hamsters. We had a successful run of hamsters when we lived in England. Cute, containable, fairly cheap. You put the little guy in a ball and watch him run around--a couple of glasses of wine and hey, it's like you're at the Olympics. But you have to remember to put him back in his cage, or you'll find one really traumatized hamster and a plastic ball filled with hamster pee and little hamster feces, stuck behind the sofa late one Saturday afternoon.

So maybe not hamsters. Can't remember basic things these days, let alone hamster balls.

Maybe menopausal women and pets are a bad combo. Like menopausal women and teenaged sons. And menopausal women and husbands. And menopausal women and work colleagues. And menopausal women and neighbors. And menopausal women and telephone survey takers. And menopausal women and pizza delivery guys. And menopausal women and supermarket checkout clerks. . . .

Maybe the isolation ward. I hear the drugs are really good.

I am not an Anglophile

Watching "Antiques Roadshow," waiting for "Doc Martin."

A friend in England once introduced me to her neighbor as a "complete Anglophile." I was stunned, and rather horrified.. An Anglophile? Me? No way. Anglophiles are like antiquarians. . . you know, crazy people, those folks who bore everybody at parties.

I am not a boring party person. I"m a British historian.

Oh dear. Not a very convincing argument.

Strange, isn't it, how one ends up doing what one does? I ended up in British history because I had to pick a senior honors thesis advisor, and  I was having a really rough time, and the British historian at Calvin was a kind, gentle man who looked like he carried peppermints in his pockets. So, I chose him instead of the famous French history guy or the cool U.S. social history guy or the serious ancient history guy. It had nothing to do with the subject; it was all about the guy. At that point in my life I desperately needed a grandpa, and Henry Ippel was it. I wrote my honors thesis, and that became what I submitted with grad school applications, so of course I ended up in British history. Happenstance, really. Just a lonely fatherless girl looking for someone to care about her. And here was this aging British history professor, such a decent man, who was willing to play the part. In such arbitrary ways, one's life gets decided.

And so, arbitrarily, as a result of a kindly college professor who never actually offered me a peppermint, I've spent much of my life studying, reading about, thinking about, living in the British Isles. I know more about British politics, social life, intellectual developments, popular and high culture, than I do the Southern American counterparts, even tho' I live in southern Louisiana. Ostensibly. But can one really live in a place when one spends most of one's time thinking about somewhere else?

After more than 20 years, I still find the South an alien place. I can't figure it out; I'm constantly stumbling, careening into no-go areas and horrified by what I uncover. Would I have embrace my area of study with such passion if I'd been able to live my life in, say, Chicago? Dunno. Life didn't happen that way. All I know is that when Keith is out of town, I switch on the Baton Rouge public radio station in the evenings: At 9 pm, the BBC World Service comes on and stays on all night long. I go to sleep, and I wake up through the night and finally in the morning, to these beautiful, comforting British accents. Strangely, the sound of home.

Beautiful Boots

Hugh asked for, and received, cowboy boots for his 17th birthday. I've never spent so much on a single pair of footwear, but even if he lost the danged things tomorrow, I'd consider it a smart purchase. He's been so happy. I think he may wear the boots in bed. And I completely understand--I have a pair of black leather boots that I wear as often as I can. I put them on, and somehow, the day becomes better.

But it's not just that he's enjoying the boots so much. It's that I'm enjoying him in them. There's something about cowboy boots--I imagine it's the heels combined with the stiff uppers--that makes a fellow walk differently. The walk morphs into a swagger; all the random intensity and staccato energy of a teenaged boy somehow slows and smooths, takes liquid form. God, he is so beautiful.

The boots have also brought me intense enjoyment by catapulting back into memories of Hugh's last pair of cowboy boots.

We were living in England and Hugh had just turned 5. It wasn't an easy time for him;  turning 5 meant not only the rigors of school (far less play-focused than its American counterpart, English early  primary schools actually expect a five-year-old boy to sit in a desk for hours at a time) but also more intense peer pressure, the gradual coming to grips with the at least outward conformity required for a successful negotiation of the quagmire that is one's childhood. Hugh, like most little boys, loved to dress up--but he particularly loved wearing dresses and high heels, a preference that by the age of 5 was distinctly problematic in XY-chromosome circles. At this crucial point, a pair of black leather cowboy boots--proper riding boots with chunky heels--and a Scottish kilt in the Royal Stewart tartan came to the rescue.

The boot were a birthday gift from my sister-in-law, who joined us on holiday in Scotland.  The kilt? Well, we were in Scotland. Scotland has kilts. In short order, so did Hugh. That kilt and those cowboy boots became his standard uniform--a dress and heels he could wear in public, even at the ripe old age of 5. God, he was so beautiful.

Into the Gap

I just realized that today is Nov. 6, which means yesterday was Nov. 5. (See, I may be in menopause, but I'm still as sharp as ever.)

The Fifth of November--how could I have forgotten? I feel like I've betrayed a fundamental part of my family's history. Not "my family" as in "my lineage." We're all Dutch, nothing to do with Guy Fawkes Day or the Gunpowder Plot, nothing interesting or important in my family lineup, just a bunch of impoverished Calvinist mud farmers from Drenthe. No, by "my family," I mean my real family: Keith and Owen and Hugh. And by "history," I mean our history, our past, our life in England.

Our first Guy Fawkes Day, or "Bonfire Night" as most people in Manchester called it, was quite a revelation. I had lived in London in November and so expected something along London lines--a few firecrackers, some film clips of bonfires in vacant lots on the evening news. But Bonfire Night in our working-class neighborhood turned out to be something more akin to a night in Baghdad during the U.S. invasion. The explosions began early and just did not stop. At one point, a cascade of bottle rockets came whizzing into our back garden (aka back yard) and slammed into the kitchen door, but that was small beer compared to the bombs detonating all around us. To my utter amazement, this society--which did not allow anyone to purchase a 12-capsule pack of ibuprofen without first listening to a lengthy lecture about the proper use of painkillers, which had banned lice-killing shampoo because of the damage it could do if overused, which did not have Jungle Gyms in its school playgrounds because of the potential danger--this society allowed the purchase and recreational use of major explosives without any apparent control or limit.

By sunset, when we were supposed to show up in a neighbor's back garden for a genuine bonfire and BBQ, four-year-old Hugh was as close to catatonic as one can be without being thrown into a hospital bed. At this point in his young life, he was acutely frightened of loud, sudden noises (so strange, given his own capacity for noise-making). If a balloon popped in Hugh's vicinity, he would go silent and freeze, his body rigid, his big dark eyes staring fixedly ahead. Even the possibility of such a noise reduced him to rigidity: the mere sight of a balloon or a party popper was enough to transmogrify all his liveliness and curiosity and endless chatter into something closer to severe autism.

Owen so desperately wanted to attend the bonfire. On the whole, life in England was just one long misery for him, so desperately, stupidly, I tried.
--Where was Keith? Usually, at this point in our lives, at some church meeting or service or event, given his position as pastor of four Methodist congregations in Manchester, but surely not on Bonfire Night? No, definitely not, and yet. . . he's not there. In these memories, he's not there. Maybe I'm transferring all those times in Manchester that he wasn't there to this particular night. I honestly can't say. But in my memory, Keith is nowhere to be found.--
All on my own, then, I jollied poor Hugh along. There must have been a hiatus in the bombing, because he did walk over to the neighbor's, and Owen was so thrilled, so enchanted with the darkness and the sense of rules being broken and the utter edginess of the night. But almost immediately the whistles and bangs began again and Hugh couldn't cope. Our accommodating, if puzzled, hosts had no problem with keeping Owen but he pleaded with me to stay; only eight, he still wanted/needed/flourished in my company. When I headed out the gate with Hugh in my arms, Owen just stared at the ground and refused to say goodbye.

And then came one of the most surreal walks of my entire life. Down this dark lane (was it dark? surely the streetlamps were on? yet I remember it as so dark) I carried my eerily silent Hugh, his body stiff, his eyes glassy, while all around us things zoomed and shrieked and zzzzed and banged and boomed.

Such a strange night. The next two Bonfire Nights were much the same: Owen eager to join the anarchy, Hugh driven deep within himself, while I sought somehow to encourage the one and comfort the other, and felt myself falling, slipping, tumbling down the gap between the two.

This I Believe

National Public Radio runs this periodic bit called "This I Believe," where ordinary and sometimes not-so-ordinary folks talk about what they believe--not always, or in fact, not usually, in the religious or dogmatic sense, but rather, in day-to-day life. Fill in the blank I believe in __________.

Everytime I hear one of these segments I think, "I believe in. . . olives."

This concerns me. What sort of person believes in olives? What does that mean?

So,tonight, fueled by a couple of glasses of wine, I intend to find out. Here goes.

I believe in olives.

I believe in the memories they conjure, of a tiny Greek village on the tiny island of Halki close to the Turkish coast, and of a magical week spent there when the boys were little. Once sustained by diving for sponges, Halki's population turned to honey cultivation after an epidemic wiped out the sponges. Then the honey bees died, and now --or then; this was 11 years ago--Halki survives solely on the tourist revenue generated by a small English company specializing in "unknown Greece."

Our time there was magical--a villa on the harbor, with our own steep descent into the water, and this little village containing nothing but the bakery where we bought our breakfast pastries, a beautiful church, an ice cream parlor, an assortment of tiny houses and five other tourist villas, one souvenir shop, one minscule grocery store, two beaches (one with a donkey and one without), and four harborside cafes. Every day, two decisions to make: where do we eat lunch? and where do we eat dinner? Not that it mattered; each of the cafes offered the same stunning view, the same just-off-the-boat seafood, the same heavenly feta cheese, the same to-die-for tomato and olive salads.

In Halki we sent 5-year-old Hugh off every morning to collect the bread and pastries for breakfast. He was so proud, so pleased to be off on his own, trusted with money, able to wind his way through the stone streets and across the church courtyard to the bakery. The villagers loved him, with his dark brown skin and curly brown-black hair and big brown eyes. In just one week, he chrmed them all, the quiet priest, the cranky young cashier in the souvenir shop, the old lady at the bakery, the fishermen in their boats. 

In Halki ten-year-old Owen, lonely and beaten down after a year being bullied in English state schools, met a friend, a fellow Harry Potter fan. They climbed up to an abandoned monastery and talked about Hogwarts and Owen remembered what it was to be ok.

I eat olives and in the salty tang and the soft yet firm texture, I taste sunny days and spiced lamb and a friendly donkey and a fresh breeze across the harbor and my boys. Happy. Thriving. Laughing.

This I believe. In olives. And my sons.

Once upon a time

So, are you watching on Friday?

Oh, come on. 'Fess up. I won't tell. I'll think you're a lunatic, but I won't tell.

If you haven't a clue as to what I'm talking about, well, kudos, my friend. But, umm, you are sort of uninformed, tho', aren't you? As the rest of the sentient universe knows, Wills and Kate are finally tying the knot on Friday and the whole world will be watching.

My students were rather surprised and, in fact, somewhat dismayed to discover I am not planning to get up at 3 am to watch the live coverage of the wedding. "But you're a British historian," they protested. "This is history! Being made!" Which would be sort of cute and adorable if I hadn't just spent a semester trying to teach them a slightly more nuanced definition of history and the making thereof.

It's not like I dislike the Royal Family. I don't. When I'm in the checkout line, I'll always pull down the magazine with a royal on the cover. Beats Brangelina and Britney any day. And in fact, I have something of an exotic pedigree as a royal watcher. I don't imagine there are many other Americans who can boast hosting a Queen's Jubilee Garden Party.

It was all Hugh's fault, of course. While we were living in Manchester, the Queen celebrated her Golden Jubilee. Hugh, then about six, attended the local primary school where they held a picnic on the Friday afternoon in the Queen's honor. Hugh came home simply on fire about the whole concept of the Jubilee and proceeded to draw up and distribute invitations to a Jubilee Garden Party in our back yard ("back garden," in Brit speak) to the entire neighborhood. Without telling us. So suddenly on Saturday afternoon, we found ourselves with a party on our hands. I think, had we not been "The Americans," the party would not have happened. But, confronted with this (seemingly legit) invitation from The Americans celebrating Our Queen, the neighbors were too embarrassed not to come--and come they did. And stay they did. We ransacked the fridge and cupboards and concocted weird party food on the spot and once we had drained our actually rather abundant liquor supply, the neighbors dashed back to their houses and returned with six-packs of beer. Hugh's Garden Party turned into one of the highlights of our three-year sojourn, an alcohol-sodden, pretzel-and-cake-filled, hours and hours-long delight in the rare Manchester sunshine, complete with beery toasts to a portrait of Her Maj.

So, no, I'm not opposed to the Royal Family. I'm not opposed to Wills or Kate. I'll even make sure I buy a souvenir wedding mug this summer, to match the Charles and Diana cup in which I keep my pens.

And yes, way back when Diana tumbled into marriage with the yet-debonair Charles, I did watch the ceremony live--from a tiny living room of a rented house in what was then West Germany, crowded on the carpet with the 25 other students with whom I was spending the summer traveling in Europe.

And then, a week later, in a London still bedecked with wedding bunting, I stood in line in the pouring rain (not your typical London mist, mind you, but torrential drenching rain, with tremendous cracks of thunder and spectacular blasts of lightning) for several hours and then tramped through St. James Palace, soaking wet and muddy, to view the Wedding Gifts. Room after room filled with not only the various precious items sent by various global dignitaries of behalf of various unsuspecting publics--I believe the American People gave Charles and Diana an American Primitive painting--but also, and so much more interesting, the ordinary gifts sent by ordinary people to a couple they seemed to believe would be happily ordinary. Yes, the toaster from Paul and Sheila Thomas of Somerset, the tea cozy from Thomas and Margaret Ashton of Kent, the plastic picnicware from George and Vera Barnes of Birmingham. As if Charles and Diana, like Paul and Sheila and Thomas and Margaret and George and Vera before them, were really embarking on an ordinary, toast-making, tea-drinking, picnic-laden married life.

Such innocence. Rather like The Dress. That amazing puffball dress. The Fairy Princess Dress. Only a 19-year-old blonde virgin could pull off that dress.

Kate, the fashion commentators assured me as I was flipping thru the channels several nights ago, Kate will not wear such a dress. Hers will be more sophisticated and slender, more befitting her willowy frame and the worldly wisdom of her 28 years. And Kate has not been subjected to a physical exam to confirm her virginity, with the results trumpeted across the globe. We have moved on. Good for us. Good for Kate.

Still. Hardly worth getting up at 3 am for, is it?

Something That Will Stay

So, in what is perhaps yet another sign of the onset of dementia, I am thinking about getting a tattoo. That I'm contemplating such a bizarre action is all, of course, Owen's fault. To say that Owen is into tattoos is to put it mildly. And he was home for six weeks for his Christmas break, which gave him lots of time to indoctrinate me. I'll admit I'm easily indoctrinated these days--the result, perhaps, of menopause or general aging, or maybe incipient insanity, or who knows, too much acupuncture or Sauvignon Blanc or my inability to exercise (still wearing post-foot surgery boot). Whatever the cause, I find myself becoming more and more amoeba-like, just a glop of protoplasm, slipping and slithering in and out of various shapes, no clear center, no fixed boundaries, no firmness of body or purpose or routine. So? A tattoo? slllliiiiippp, ssssllliiitherrr, ssssllllllimmmme, oh why not?

But just a little one. Just a teeny tiny tattoo. A hedgehog. A very English hedgehog. In memory of a delightful day at a hedgehog sanctuary in Devon when we lived in England and the boys were small and I was their Mum.

Owen's back at college in Oregon. He hopes to spend the summer up there as well. And probably all future summers. He'll be back next Christmas, but never again for several weeks--his lengthy break this year was an anomoly, an unexpected benefit of his fall semester internship. So, this was it, really. He'll be back for visits, but I doubt he'll ever live here, with us, with me, again.

Maybe I'll make it a great big hedgehog.

Mac-and-Cheese

I made macaroni and cheese last night, from a new Weightwatcher's recipe. (I know, "Weightwatcher's" and "mac-and-cheese"--something of a contradiction in terms.) And I've been mired in nostalgia ever since.

Nostalgic, but not for my mom's mac-and-cheese. She never made it, weirdly enough for a 1960s Midwestern suburban housewife. And not even for college, when my roommate Marcia would eat an entire box of Kraft's Mac-and-Cheese, and say brightly, "Just 39 cents! Can you believe it?!"

No, the nostalgia focused on the small dining area of a semi-detached house on a quiet horseshoe street off the main road of a slightly gritty working-class neighborhood in Manchester. England. That's the North of England, depressed, post-industrial England, not the thatched-roof, hobbit-y, touristed South.

There, for three years in a tiny kitchen, I made macaroni and cheese from an English newspaper recipe, not out of the box, not glow-in-the-dark orange, but homemade and healthy, appealing to both adults and children. (This, of course, was before Owen, inspired by the animal rights movement, became a vegan, and before Hugh, out of deep anti-parent principles, stopped eating anything prepared by his mother or father. ) We ate together, every night.

And Keith had to leave for a meeting, every night. And the boys fought each other, every night. And I fought against--and frequently lost the battle to--depression many nights. Not exactly Andy Griffith or Leave It to Beaver.

And yet--was it the dairy? the carbs? maybe the olive oil or the whole wheat breadcrumbs?-there were these mac-and-cheese moments, just moments, yes, just little parentheses inserted in some fairly bleak paragraphs, but good moments, nonetheless, powerful parentheses, glimpses of Mayberry and Mayfield in gritty, rainy Manchester. And I miss that.

The Queen Goes Shopping

I've finally solved a mystery that has been perplexing me for years: Where does the Queen of England get those dresses and handbags? Now I know. From a small coastal town in Norfolk called Sheringham. Like all coastal British towns, Sheringham bulges with tea shops and fish-n-chippies and ice cream counters and hopeful watercolorists. Unusually, however (at least in my experience, and I actually do have some experience in British beach holidays--much more so, bizarrely, than most of the natives of my acquaintance, who flee to Spain or Egypt or Thailand for their seaside getaways), Sheringham also includes a large number of ladies' clothing shops, all frozen somewhere in the mid-1950s.

So now I know. In the off-season, Her Maj must scutter on down and load up the Rolls with heaps of flowered frocks and boxy handbags. Maybe she stops at Ye Olde Tea Shoppe for a herring bap or a bacon buttie, and then strolls along the promenade and watches the waves. I hope so. I'm sure it would do her good.

The Odd Football

I'm not yet 50; I don't think I'm suffering from dementia. But if I'm not demented, then it must actually be true that 1) most Americans really are aware that the World Cup is happening, and 2) some Americans truly care about the results.

This is just plain weird.

Not necessarily bad, mind you. It's good that Americans show some awareness of what's going on in the rest of the world, I think, and actually, tho' I don't know much about it, soccer (aka everywhere else in the world "football") seems an interesting game: lots of action, genuine athleticism, and some truly lovely muscular calves. (Tho', sadly, as in basketball, the adoption of those baggy, knee-length shorts utterly ruins the butt viewing.)

But still, Americans and the World Cup, Americans and pro soccer--very weird.

I remember before we moved to Manchester (England) in 1999 being told that the first question we'd be asked was "Man U vs. Man City?" In other words, which football side do you support, Manchester United or Manchester City? Right, I thought. Like the Chicago Cubs vs. the White Sox. I get it.

Nope. I didn't. It's more like Cubs vs. Sox plus Catholic vs. Protestant plus East vs. West plus Man vs. Woman plus Serb vs. Croatian plus steak-lover vs. vegan. . . .

There simply is no way for an American to understand the passion that soccer--football--arouses in the rest of the world. Take the World Series and add the Super Bowl, the Final Four, the Stanley Cup, Wimbledon and the Master's, and then mix in, I dunno, every celebrity wedding over the past decade. That's the World Cup.

That's football. The real football.

We had no idea.

Before we moved to England. a very good English friend advised us to make sure we immersed Owen (then 8-years-old) in "football" culture. Of course lots of American kids play soccer, but Owen was never interested, and Keith and I, having watched little kids' sports teams wreak havoc on friends' families, were happy not to encourage it.

So we laughed and ignored the advice. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Poor Owen. An 8-year-old boy in Manchester, England who knows nothing about soccer becomes immediately the object of intense curiosity, incomprehension, and outright contempt.

We did try--once we got to England and came to our senses, we did try. Brave little Owen tried. He signed up right away for a neighborhood football team. Before the first practice, I introduced myself to the two dad-coaches, and tried to explain that Owen knew nothing about this game. Oh, right, right, they smiled and assured me, "he'll luv it, luv." Until at some point in the next hour, the ball came within reach of Owen's confused foot, and he kicked it. Toward the opponent's goal. Afterwards, the two coaches came running up to me. One was simply speechless. The other gasped out, "He, he doesn't know the rules! He doesn't even know the rules!" Right, said I, I told you that. He's never seen or played football. And the two of them, really nice blokes, actually, just stared at me. What I was saying had no meaning; it simply did not compute. How could an 8-year-old boy NOT KNOW FOOTBALL?

He learned. We all learned. But still, when the boys' school decreed that all the children were to be delivered to the classroom at 7 am rather than the usual 9 am, so as not to disturb the teachers' viewing of the World Cup match (broadcast from Japan), we were the only parents who thought it slightly, you know, odd.

Sort of like the rest of the world views us, Americans, the U.S. You know, odd.

Bad Words II

In 1999 we moved to Manchester, England. Owen was 8 years old, and the move was brutal on him. Differences in the dates used to decide placement meant the poor kid was put in Year 4 (4th grade basically) when he had only just finished 2nd grade. That meant he missed lessons in what the English call "script": cursive writing. So he couldn't read anything the teacher wrote on the board and he couldn't understand the northern English accent. Plus we lived in a working-class center-city neighborhood--rather more gritty than what Owen was used to. As his headmaster put it, "He's having a bit of trouble with the rough-and-tumble of the playyard." Actually, what he said was, "'e's 'avin' eh bi' uh trooble wi' thi roof-'n-toomble uh thi playyard."

For example:

After about two days in school, Owen came home and asked, "Mom [in a few weeks, it would be "Mum" but not yet], what's a fooker?"
"Fooker? Gosh, hon, no idea. Can you use it in a sentence?"
"Yeah. The kids say, 'Yeh blewdy moother fooker."
Oh.

Over the next several weeks came many more new words: Git. Tosser. Wanker. Slag. Skank. But none measured up to Blewdy Moother Fooker.

[Bad Words I]

Bad Words

I never used to swear or curse. I grew up in an astonishingly curse-free, swear-averse environment. My mom and dad did both say the occasional shit, but that didn't count--as I explained in an earlier post, shit isn't really a Bad Word in the Dutch immigrant society that constituted my early universe. But hell, damn, dammit, God, Goddamn, oh God, my God, oh my God, Jesus, Christ, and Jesus Christ--if not used in the religious context, such words were absolutely, utterly forbidden. And I never heard either of my parents--or their friends-- use these words in a cursing context, not ever, not even during their pinochle games with friends that went long into the night and were accompanied by copious quantities of hard liquor. (Always a light sleeper and a highly skilled eavesdropper, I'd lie in bed and listen to the rumble of adult talk punctuated by shouts of laughter.) The only exceptions were the Donovans, but that made sense because unlike all my parents' other friends, the Donovans were not Dutch and they did not attend a Reformed or a Christian Reformed church. So they did utter the occasional damn and their girls, my some time playmates, frequently said, Oh my Gahd. But Mrs. Donovan was also the only mom I knew who smoked and drank beer, so it was all of a piece.

Swear words had a small but more marked presence in my childhood,via my older brothers and the occasional movie. I first heard cunt, for example, when I saw An Officer and a Gentleman in high school; I wasn't really sure what it meant tho' I sort of got the gist of it. And I first heard prick in an argument between my brothers; I just thought, huh? Fuck came in much earlier, I don't know how, when, where, or why (probably the Donovan girls); but I knew the word, and knew it was Really Really Bad long before I knew its literal meaning.

But the point is, I didn't say it. Or any of these words. Except in situations of extreme duress or heartbreak. That's what they were for. Words that tore through the curtains of respectability, words that broke all the rules in acknowledgment that extraordinary times demand extraordinary words.

Now I swear and curse all the time. Extraordinary words for extraordinary times? Umm, well, "extraordinary times" hardly seems an appropriate label for the mundanities of menopause. Mostly I'm just tired, confused, and pissed off most of the time, and so inclined to ignore the rules.

But my linguistic descent began before the onset of menopause. First, there was George W. Bush. Honestly, during the Bush years, how could one not swear and curse?

And then there was, there is, the Owen Factor. I realize parents are supposed to mold their children, rather than vice versa, but basically I've learned to swear from my son. Most kids are fascinated by Bad Words but Owen, Owen was enchanted, mesmerized, transfixed, obsessed. When he was tiny and the Bad Words were shut up and stupid, I finally told him if he felt like saying them, he should go into the bathroom. If he wanted to whisper Bad Words in there, or shout them, or chant them, well, ok. So, golly, that's what he did. Repeatedly. Enjoyed himself immensely. As Owen got older and we'd allow him to watch the occasional PG film, he'd giggle in absolute delight at every naughty word. And then we moved to England, where we lived in a working-class neighborhood and took the city bus to his school, so his mornings were filled with "fookin' idjut" and "bloody hell, yeh wanker." He lapped it up.

Then we came home from England and took the boys to an anti-Iraq war rally in New Orleans. Within minutes, 12-year-old Owen was part of a college group that had resurrected that old chant, "1-2-3-4, We don't want your fuckin' war!" He was so happy.

By the time Owen entered high school, we were battling constantly, and fruitlessly, against his bad language. Then, at age 15, he spent 6 months in South Africa on an international student program. Fundamentalist Christians, his host family nonetheless utilized fuck as comma, period, exclamation point, adjective, and qualifying adverb. And that was it. Owen came home, we acknowledged defeat in the language war, and somewhere along the line I went over to his side.

Which is a problem. Because when the bad times come, as they do, as they will, what words will I have left?

The Slough of Corruption

It's official. I am Morally Corrupt.

I used to be pure. Unsullied. I didn't own a tv. Then my mom gave me an old black-and-white portable that used to be in my parents' bedroom. That was fine. Most of the time the "picture" was just a bunch of wavy lines, so I could watch I, Claudius and yet still feel untainted because I was really just listening. That tv melted in an apartment fire and shortly thereafter, I took my first step down the slippery slope. I accepted a small color tv (bizarrely, the giver was once again my mom, not usually one to play the Temptress in my life's story).

So, ok, tv. But free tv. I drew the line at paid tv, and when we married, Keith gave up his cable subscription. Time drifted on, however, as did technology, and eventually we found the only way to ensure that the free network channels would actually appear on the screen was to purchase a cable tv subscription. Basic cable, just the networks and a bunch of local and religious stations, but still, we were now paying--paying--for tv. Down the slope we slid.

I suppose I should note we had paid for tv before--when we lived in England. But that's different. That's paying for the BBC. The BBC is worth it. It's moral. Totally different.

Anyway, there we were back in the U.S., with Basic Cable, clinging to our moral sense, as the boys moaned and whined and sulked and pestered us. Evidently we were the only family left in America with Basic Cable. Evidently we were guilty of child abuse by depriving them of Nick-at-Nite and MTV. But we stood firm.

Until Keith read one of those mail advertisement things and discovered that for less than what we had been paying, we could get our wireless internet bundled in with our phone and satellite tv--with the regular package of tv channels. Well. A Really Good Deal trumped morality. We went from about 5 watchable channels to umm, 95? Not that all 95 are watchable, not at all, but the thing is, the regular package included BBCAmerica, which meant there was no going back. Not ever. Life without BBCAmerica is totally unthinkable. I am not sure how I survived so much of my adult life without it. I know for a fact that if I were deprived of the new Doctor Who, my adult life would not be worth living.

Still, I retained some shreds of moral decency--after all, we purchased only the regular package, not the fullbore, deluxe, HBO-Showtime extravaganza. "Oh, we don't have HBO," I could say gently, but loftily, when someone started raving on about The Wire or Mad Men or whatever. We are Good People. We wait for the series to come out on Netflix. We do not demand Immediate Gratification. We do not Spend Our Money on TV. Umm, not as much as we could, anyway.

Then I read about this new HBO series: Treme'. Set in post-Katrina New Orleans. it begins tonight. We live in south Louisiana. We lived thru Katrina. Keith works with the homeless--Katrina continues to shape his daily work life. And it continues to shape the world in which we live. We can't wait for Netflix. So, weve upgraded to HBO. We'll be watching the series premiere in just 15 minutes.

It's official. I'm morally corrupt. I gotta say, tho', this moral corruption stuff, it's really kinda fun. We just watched True Blood--without waiting for Netflix. And there are these cool movies. And that Tudor series is coming on. And Hugh is so very happy . . .

Girlie Glam

I'll confess, I wanted daughters. Actually, it's not much of a confession. Anyone and everyone who knows me knows my longing for a daughter. Not instead of my sons, mind you, but in addition to. (Well, ok, it is true that I have proposed a straightforward swap to my sister Cheryl on numerous occasions--"I'll trade you Hugh for either Elizabeth or Allie"--but that's only because both of her girls seem like they really should be mine, and Hugh really wants a mom who wears high heels, drives a cool car, and has granite countertops.) Nonetheless, I have found raising sons fascinating.

Particularly the gender-bending. By the time Owen was three, I waded daily through imaginary pools of blood and climbed over piles and piles of fantasy bodies--the pretend corpses of the Bad Guys slain by Sir Owen, Owen the Cowboy Kid, Pirate Owen, and Owen the Red Power Ranger. And yet, when we pulled up to the McDonald's drive-in window, he would ask for the girl's Happy Meal, because he preferred the mini-Barbies to the Matchbox cars.

With Hugh, the gender bending intensified. Unlike Owen, Hugh had no interest in Romance or History. With Owen, bedtime reading brought us to Narnia, to Prydain, to the Shire and Mordor. Hugh, however, preferred to read about shark habitats and the nocturnal habits of ants. When I traveled on imaginary excursions with Owen, we trekked to Camelot or Sherwood Forest, to the Alamo or to Perelandra. With Hugh, we drove to Shreveport. The point is, Owen found that sparkle and glamour, the sense of glory, the breach in the boundaries of space and time--all of which is so essential to make it through the agonies of childhood--from his rich fantasy life. Hugh had to find it elsewhere.

And when he was little, he found it in cross-dressing. Let's face it, boy's clothes are pretty boring. But walk on over to the girls' department, well, it's the stuff of fantasy: Glitter, lace, sequins, silk, velvet. Camis and slips. Shawls, feathery boas, capes. Nail polish. Eye shadow, eyebrow pencil, blush, lipstick. Earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings, scarves, belts. High-heeled booties, strappy sandals, spiky-heeled and toeless pumps. Barrettes, braids, ribbons, tiaras, headbands. Who can blame a little boy in search of glamour and glory for plunging in? And so he did. At his request, I regularly painted his toenails (that way, he could hide the color when he felt it necessary and flaunt it when he found it safe). He saved up his weekly allowance to buy sparkly high heels from the Girlie Dress-Up aisle in Walmart's toy section. He adapted whatever was at hand (dish towels, my negligee's, aprons) to fashion evening gowns.

Then we moved to England, and on one school holiday took a trip to Scotland. And there were men in skirts. Men. In public. In skirts. Within 24 hours of our crossing the Scottish border, Hugh had a kilt. Which he proudly wore for the next two years--with his beloved cowboy boots.

Hedgehog

In England, hedgehog population numbers are in precipitous decline. One (among many) key factors is the hedgetrimmer, aka the Weedwhacker. The adorable little hedgehog is snuffling along, doing her hedgehoggy thing as hedgehogs have done in English gardens for generations, and all of a sudden--thwackthwackthwackthwack! And the gardener moves on, oblivious, while beneath the bushes or thicket or brambles, the hedgehog lies dying, bleeding, her fur and flesh hanging off in strips.

I just spent 24 hours in the company of my almost-15-year-old son. My fur and flesh hang off in strips, my blood seeps out. He moves on, oblivious.