Why am I going on about all this? I guess because next week I'm going back to visit the family on a holiday for the first time in nearly 10 years. Even though I'm not a little kid anymore, I'm scared.

When I was a kid, I used to feel the same way as that little boy from work. It's really hard when you've a parent (or two) who's impaired in some way, and you have to make adult decisions when your brain's not mature enough to do so. I remember thinking so hard about stuff that my head would hurt and I wished to God for Dad/Grandma/our neighbor to come and help make life easier. Never happened, though.

I used to work in an agency that did foster placements, and it was amazing the number of times one of the social workers would find a foster parent whaling the hell out of a kid in the burger joint just outside the offices, often on the way to an appointment. This would call for taking the kid away right away and making emergency accomodations - even if that meant housing the kid at their place for a bit. Though I worked in administration, a couple requirements for us all were that we be trained in crisis intervention and that we do some field work. As a result, we'd often end up keeping an eye on stray kids.

For some reason, one little boy would find himself in our office regularly. He was small for his age (around eight), had huge eyes, and was very, very grave in demeanor. Whenever my one colleague (a tall, handsome Cape Verdean man who usually got boys left with him - great male role model, loved kids. The case workers loved him to bits.) wasn't around, I'd help out. I think that initially he was a little mistrustful of me, since I was another Big White Person, and they seemed to be the ones jerking him around a lot. Eventually, though, for a variety of reasons (Butcher paper and the big box of crayons. My really awesome tattoo. The fact that I took french fry breaks instead of coffee breaks, among other things), he warmed up to me.

We used to have some great conversations about what he liked (tattoos - wanted one on his arm like I had. Only in Chinese. When I asked him what he wanted the tattoo to say, he said that he didn't know, because he didn't speak Chinese and wouldn't understand it.) and disliked (sitting around in offices - he had plenty of experience in this), what he wanted to be when he'd grow up, places he'd like to visit. I learned that he liked roller coasters, but was too small to go on one yet. Also - he liked cheese pizza, but didn't care for egg rolls. Since he acted so mature for his age, I'd sometimes forget that he was a little kid and start asking him too many questions, giving him too many choices, treating him like he was older than he could handle. This was when he'd start getting a bit irritable, his body language would change, and he'd get this look in his eyes that said "hey, lay off. You're the big person, I'm the little person. Why don't you act your part so that I can act mine?" After a few experiences with this, figured out how to stop myself and let him be a kid again.

Eventually, he got placed with a good family whose intention was to eventually adopt (they had a history with us; it was cool.) him, so that was the end of the visits. All for the best, though. Two jobs and several years later, though, I still think about him. He'd be in high school now. How's he doing? Did he ever get adopted? Does he still want to be a police man? Has he ever gotten to ride a roller coaster? I also think a lot about the look he'd get when he wanted an adult to make the decisions. I hope that his new family picked up on it.

War injuries.

I'm never without pain; some days I just manage it better than others. When the weather changes or I get stressed out, though, sometimes it can be darn well near unbearable. These are the times when I find myself in a terrible mood and liable to hurt others' feelings. I don't want them to feel pain like I do, yet like some sort of savage I'll still inflict it.

It's cold and damp out, so my hands and wrists are swollen like an arthritic's. My neck is starting to shift into an unhealthy position, so the shoulders and back are hurting. My left knee, pelvis and ankles are also throbbing. I'm sure that tonight my jaw will lock from the clenching I'll do in my sleep - a subconscious reaction to the pain.

As awful as this all sounds, it's actually better than not feeling. For years I pushed the feeling away and neglected the body. My therapist called it dissociation. I called it transcendence. Now I hurt sometimes hard enough to scream, to cry, to want to be dead. Sometimes I will scream, but into a pillow. I don't want to upset my landlord. I do cry a lot (have a lot of lost tears to make up for). I don't want to be dead, though. I was dead-alive for decades, but somehow managed to resurrect me. I don't want to go back to the dead place again.

Ordinarily I don't care for fisking; generally see it as an exercise in pettiness. However, this article does an excellent job of showing a very political appointment by a self-proclaimed non political group.

-via Andrew Sullivan

On one of my recent walks home from work, I decided to pick up a couple Honey Locust pods. Figured I'd try growing my own as a project over the winter. We have a lot of them in my neighborhood, and I've grown to love them in all their thorny glory. In the spring, they give us beautiful white-wisteria-looking flowers whose scent could never be bottled. In summer, sunshine filtering through the lacy-patterned compound leaves illustrates the term "sun dappled" perfectly for me. In fall, those same leaves turn the color of school buses before falling off - a nice change from the drabber yellows of the Norway Maple and Ailanthus. In the wintertime, the spiked varieties look a little bit like characters from a Tim Burton story; kind of sad and grotesque at the same time. It's always a relief to see them bud again come spring.

Karen, who spends a good amount of her gardening time battling the seedlings, told me that they're very prolific and they grow fast. Guess I'll have to choose wisely where I plant, then. (Maybe will give Pablo's backyard a present. We'll see.)

Day Four

Of 'Walking on the Moon.' I tried to hammer it out with a bit of gamelan last night but it eased its way back into my head while I slept.

Two particularly funny lists from McSweeney's:

Reasons Bloggers Hate the Mainstream Media.

The MSM is too liberal.

Professor always calls on the MSM.

Bloggers got stood up at prom. By the MSM.

-BY WILLIAM WOLFE

- - - -

Least Reputable Charities.

Doctors Without Credentials

Habitat for Sean Hannity

Red Cross—Undisclosed Location in the Cayman Islands Division

United l77t d00d College Fund

Feed the Children (to Other Children)

Oxporn

-BY LUCAS COX

- - - -

Also noticed that they've got some new sestinas up. (Yay! Sestinas!)

I had no idea that it would be so difficult to use the phrase délicieusement démodé in a work conversation. Most IT people don't consider démodé to be particularly délicieux.

On the ride up Broadway to the I93 connector, we sat waiting at a light. The fellow next to us had his windows down and was cranking some eighties underwater reggae sounds. Was very funny to note all the heads in cars around him bobbing in sync.

Maudslay.

This weekend's adventure took us up to the Maudslay estate in Newburyport. Strange to be on the North Shore, but not in sight of the Atlantic. Instead, we got to wander a ways along the Merrimac River.



Though leaf-season's largely over in this part of the state, we did see some indications that at peak it must have been stunning.



This park was, at one point, a second home to a wealthy family. Interestingly enough, all one could see was traces of the former estate: foundations of buildings, carriage trails, the layouts of some formerly spectacular gardens now gone to seed.



(Hal really got into photographing these ornamental grasses in one open area)





As always, the trusty assistant kept herself busy and in not too much trouble during the obsessive photoshoots.



(One could do worse than be a climber of trees.)

While wandering through a grove of rhododendrons (and it was a grove - these bushes were at least twice our height), we happened upon a small graveyard. Originally thoght it might be one of those old New England family plots. Turned out it was a plot for pets. Six or seven of them, if I remember correctly.



A great picnic spot was on the hill where one of the original houses stood. How wonderful to be out enjoying the sun, good company, a view that once only very wealthy people could have. Makes ordinary turkey sandwiches and apples that much nicer.

Monday morning's flower is another Autumn fruit.



There's something about bushwacking through a field of ripe milkweed pods and setting the seeds aloft that makes us feel like kids again. Hal and I made short work of one such field we encountered on our Weekly Adventure up the Nawth Shaw.



Amazing how such a seemingly chaotic seed dispersal system is packaged so neatly.



The Jumblies had their sieve, Hal has his milkweed pod. Can't really cut through the waves like 'Jarvy,' (why don't people name rowboats like they do larger craft?) but seems to handle well in calmer waters.

Glorious Sunday.

Today was one of those rare November days where I could open all my windows and warm up the house.

Spent a good half-day in the garden winterizing everything: pulled up the dead leaves of perennials, raked leaves, pruned/trimmed things that needed it, mowed the lawn for the last time this year, set the garden hose out to drain. Was too good a day not to be doing these things. As it turned out, most of my neighbors felt the same way, so got to get back in touch with them. Heard about Raphaella's newest grandchild, got to see my landlord's new kitchen and bathroom (similar to what's going to happen to my place if I'm to believe his threats), 'shot the sh!t' with my stoner just-out-of-college neighbor. He's funny and actually quite smart. Grew up on a farm in Vermont somewhere. Wish he didn't do so much pot, though.

In the house, I swept, but didn't bother with mopping. Just didn't feel like it. Instead, I bound off the raw edge of a sampler that Hal's mom wove. Though just a practice piece, it's pretty and exuberantly Latvian enough to make it a very happy addition to my house's décor as a piano runner. Bought some almond oil recently at Target and rubbed it into my piano (whose name is Daisy, in case you were wondering). She's positively glowing now. Now, to find a decent tuner.

Heard again from mon ami de loin. Assures me that, though things aren't wonderful right now, they aren't as bad as the media are playing things up to being. It's sort of the US media getting back for Europe's hyping of Katrina. (I tend to agree.) Talked a bit about Armistice - what we did for meditating on it, what it means to us. His favorite novel on that subject is "All Quiet on the Western Front." Mine is "To Serve Them All My Days."

I really appreciate how this person makes me laugh. May never meet him, but he does really benefit me. Am happy for that.

Ran some errands, finished cleaning my place, caught up with whom I needed to, napped. Am now getting ready to listen to Opera Night on 'HRB and get some knitting done. Then off to bed.

What a good life I have. Everyone should be as lucky as I am.

Ambient noise pillows to help soldiers in war zones sleep?

It's an intriguing theory, and if it works - great. I wonder, though, how many soldiers might find this sort of therapy annoying to the point of being detrimental to their mental health?

As I live in a very densely-populated urban area, I've learned to fall asleep through just about any noise (even the occasional gunshot). I cannot, however, fall asleep if a radio is on. One friend of mine, who couldn't deal with the constant outside noise, got one of those Sharper Image ambient noise-makers and absolutely loved it. I found, though, that the fake waves-on-the-shore and birds-twitttering sounds put me on edge. Made me grind my teeth. Enraged me to the point where I had to either sleep in another room or resign myself to waking up in a combattive mood the next day.

Looks like we've got the preschool equivalent to the $600 SUV stroller right here.

Apparently, some (more educated, better-heeled) parents are looking to provide academic advantage for their kids when they hit kindergarten, what with "No Child Left Behind" looming over everyone like the Sword of Damocles and all. Kaplan (et al), of course is right there to supply something to help them spend their money. From what I gather in the article, this sort of tutoring provides very little if any return for toddlers, unless they have a learning disability. If anything, it may well turn kids off of school. We'll see in a few years, I guess.

A little personal note, here: neither of my parents graduated college, and only one grandparent graduated high school. Everybody loved to read, however. Everybody loved music as well. As a result, my brother and I were always read to, danced with or sung to. Even my dad, who wasn't very musically inclined, would sing to us. We'd get "God Bless America" every night, though, because that was the one song he knew all the words to. My mom, who had years of lessons from her time with the nuns, would play anything and everything on the piano.

These loves wore off on my brother and me, and helped us quite a bit through some rough years both at home and school. The family investment, when we had it, is something that I've drawn comfort from during some awful, dark times.

I can't stress enough the importance of less, but better television. Push Big TV to give us something more useful than what they think we want. (And don't give me that whole "well, PBS lost a lot of government funding..." line - how many garbage travel shows with corporate sponsorship do they have now? How many membership drives do we submit ourselves to for the relative rock video that Nova's become? PBS is doing perfectly fine. They'd do better if what they offered was better.) Growing up, I rarely, if ever watched television; don't know that we had one when I was little. I vaguely remember the Big Three PBS shows from trips to grandparents' houses and from a grainy, off-color screen color TV somewhere that didn't get all the stations. Started learning French from Sesame Street. Also got a great head start in what some program director in one of Kaplan toddler tutorials called "valuable pre-reading experience and phonetic recognition" from Electric Company. Easy Reader gave me the confidence to sound things out on street signs, etc. By the time I started Kindergarten, I could read perfectly fine on my own. My brother took off a bit more slowly, as it turns out he's dyslexic. He consumes books like potato chips, though, and has turned out to be a darned good writer.

Back to music. As I said, there was a lot of that in our household and not just because everyone was a musician. They weren't, but that didn't stop anyone from having fun playing. Dust off that old guitar, get the piano tuned. One doesn't have to be a Segovia or Horowitz to play anything from the Fireside Book. Don't know an instrument? Then sing! Even if it's only one song! Or learn to play an instrument: Guitar setups are fairly cheap (cheaper than a piano, that's for sure). Buy one, get a Mel Bay book, learn a couple chords. Kids would learn something important, too, in seeing that not everybody's immediately a virtuoso, that some things take time to learn to do right, and that you can still have fun playing, singing, dancing, whatever, while in the process of learning. All that, in addition to getting one's kids outdoors (playing, not to Starbucks) every day is healthy both for the kids and for parents. Ultimately, it's the investment of things other than money in one's kids that generally brings greater returns than engaging yet another kind of paid help.

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

-John McCrae (1872-1918)


Au Champ d'honneur

Au champ d'honneur, les coquelicots
Sont parsemés de lot en lot
Auprès des croix; et dans l'espace
Les alouettes devenues lasses
Mêlent leurs chants au sifflement
Des obusiers.

Nous sommes morts
Nous qui songions la veille encor'
À nos parents, à nos amis,
C'est nous qui reposons ici
Au champ d'honneur.

À vous jeunes désabusés
À vous de porter l'oriflamme
Et de garder au fond de l'âme
Le goût de vivre en liberté.
Acceptez le défi, sinon
Les coquelicots se faneront
Au champ d'honneur.

-Jean Pariseau

Thank Heavens.

Instapundit's right - we need to hear more of this from the President. The administration needs to work a heck of alot harder than they have been on getting the truth out because, thanks to a hostile press and the amazing ease of diffusing (dis)information, lies "...made it all the way around the world several times over before the truth had time to even get its underwear on, much less its pants..."

Sorry, but...No.

White flags are not peace flags; they're surrender flags.

The traditional flag to be putting on a veteran's grave is an American flag.

Have seen these people before. Usually they're hanging out on bridges holding signs. I'd ask what the heck they were thinking, getting off their Sunday Lunch Hour sign-holding schedule, but I guess I already know the answer to that.

Let's remember to keep the "X" in "Xmas."

Back when I was younger, you couldn't start harping on "Merry Christmas" as being Anti-PC until after Thanksgiving.

More bad news from Home. It never ends, I swear.