ever-fixed mark

“No, no, Boy Wonder, I said ‘Foil the caper,’ not ‘toilet paper’!”

Between the two trips I took this week, Husband had to handle the home front by himself for almost five days straight. At the end of this very long week, Aitch fell on the playground, slicing open his face, and Husband had to spend five hours in the emergency room waiting for two stitches to be put in.

As Husband explained it, Aitch was going down the slide backwards and on his belly when he gained a little too much speed, and his head struck the edge, which cut open the flesh near the eye. There were blood and tears, and Husband scooped up Aitch, threw him in the stroller, and ran home as fast as he could. That is, Husband ran for a block and a half before he ran out of breath and had to slow to a “brisk walk.” Luckily by this time the blood had slowed and the tears stopped, and so Aitch was in no immediate danger of exsanguination. (You know how you’re always asking why I bother to work out? This is why, Honey.)

Aitch was reportedly a trouper through the whole thing, enduring the long wait with good humor, and crying only when the stitches were put in. At the hospital, Husband explained to me incredulously, they had to sit in the waiting room for hours, then wait in the exam room for an hour, then wait after the local anesthetic had been applied for the doctor to show, then wait for an additional half hour after the stitches were finished for the discharge instructions to be printed out. I was incredulous at Husband’s incredulity. I remarked, not for the first time, that Husband would be better prepared for life’s little exigencies if he would only pay closer attention to “ER.”

While all this was happening, I was stuck in traffic, going through security, sitting on the airplane, driving home. Husband got Aitch home and put to bed just minutes before I walked in. I missed it all.

While I was in transit I couldn’t help thinking of a book I read when I was a kid, Kramer vs. Kramer. I believe it was turned into a movie with Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, bits of which I’ve seen on TV over the years. A woman has left her husband and four-year-old son, and the man (in those cold, pre-stay-at-home dad days) is completely unprepared for his role as a single father. He has a couple of rough months when the kid falls on the playground and hurts himself. Caring for his boy leads the father to a kind of breakthrough: he changes from a grudging caretaker to a real dad. When his wife turns up to seek a divorce and reclaim custody of the child, she uses this injury against him in court, but he argues that he was there, parenting, while she was off finding herself, and he is awarded custody.

I wish I had been there.

I’m back in Chicago. It’s a quick trip, just overnight, so there’s no time for lengthy Proustian reminiscences. Lucky you!

I think I heard, somewhere, that some Chicago team won some important championship, but it wasn’t the Cubs so I can’t be arsed to care, really.

The great thing about a meeting in Chicago: Lin Brehmer in the morning!

The lousy thing about a meeting in Chicago: They start work so damn early here that I will miss most of Lin Brehmer in the morning! Eight a.m.? Who meets at 8:00 a.m.? Farmers? Bakers? Birds?

The Midwest can’t get over the fact that they’re one hour behind the East Coast; they have to move everything back an hour so that they feel like they’re keeping pace. I’ve never understood this. Relax, Midwest! Let prime time programming start at 8:00 p.m., the way God intended, and keep the late news at 11:00 p.m. The ten o’clock news is the early news, not the late news.

And for the love of all that’s holy, sleep in until a reasonable hour. New York and Boston and Washington, D.C. will still be there when you get up, and they won’t have accomplished anything other than downing a few cups of coffee.

When people at work tell me how very, very overworked they are, I tend to call bullshit. I think most people are lazy and inefficient. I myself am terribly efficient, but only because I am terribly lazy and am always looking to complete my work in the shortest time possible, so I can read recaps of “7th Heaven” on Television without Pity. (Have you ever seen “7th Heaven”? I haven’t, but the recaps are hilarious. I am addicted.)

When I was first starting on my career in pharma, my laziness-fueled efficiency, combined with my eagerness to retain my cushy job, led me to respond with alacrity to every request for assistance. Taking on new responsibilities when asked, without complaining, became first a habit and then, as I became more established, a point of pride. I enjoyed seeing how much of my work I could streamline and automate, how much faster I could work. This was not a trait that endeared me to my colleagues when I was a regular employee, but when you’re self-employed, more work = more money.

Now, though, I have to join the ranks of the whiny. I am overwhelmed with work.

It’s not that I have too many hours of work, exactly. I’m not tied to the computer fifteen hours a day, or anything like that. But I have three big projects right now, each of which requires my complete attention, as well as the usual life stuff like keeping a household running, coordinating my calendar with Husband’s, keeping Dog on his schedule and, oh yeah, caring for my son.

This is not the way I usually work. Typically, I have one big project in which I am immersed and a bunch of small side projects. I usually keep all the projects running in the background of my brain and toggle from one to the other, sometimes from one minute to the next. That strategy is just not working, though, with three big projects. It’s too much to multi-task; to be really effective, I have to comparmentalize. To work on one project, I need to put everything else in my brain away — not just minimize the windows, but shut down the applications completely. Then and only then do I have the mental bandwidth to internalize all the details I need to work effectively on that project.

It’s the compartmentalization that terrifies me. I’m not used to putting things away, mentally; what if I lose something for good? I live in fear that I’m going to forget something big at the last minute, like a business trip or a meeting. As it is, I find myself sitting in nondescript hotel conference rooms trying to get a glimpse of the hotel address on the little notepads that they leave on the table, so I can remind myself: “Tulsa, Tulsa. That’s right, these must be the urinary incontinence people. Or are they the diabetic foot ulcers?”

I need to trust, trust that it will all be there when I get back, recorded in my computer if not in my brain. This is hard. It’s hard for work, and it’s even harder for my personal life. I’ve learned to compartmentalize Aitch and Husband as well, and I hate that. When I first went back to work (two days after Aitch came home; Husband and I continued to work full time and travel half time, and the person who was home got all the child care responsibilities; how nutty was that?), I couldn’t imagine ever detaching from Aitch mentally, and for a long time I didn’t. Work was accomplished via twenty-minute stretches sandwiched in between feedings and playtime, naps and baths. In the old house Aitch’s bedroom and my office were two halves of an open third floor, so he was always literally right there.

Now Aitch goes to day care about six hours a day, Husband’s home much of the time, work has taken off, and I’ve learned to let myself be taken off with it. This is the original mother-guilt — not “how could I let someone else raise my child?” but “how could I separate my personal life from my professional life?”

Not “how can I,” but “how could I?”

Two months ago, I was on a plane to Tampa for my brother’s wedding the day before Hurricane Katrina was to blow through the city on the way out to the Gulf. Instead, it swung west and hit New Orleans instead. The rest is history.

Today, Hurricane Wilma devastated Naples, Florida, where I lived for two years while I taught at East Naples Middle School. Tomorrow, as I’m driving from Newark back up to Massachusetts, Wilma will be heading back up the coast with me. I truly hope it heads far out to sea before it can do too much damage to our poor, beleaguered beach, which is already heavily eroded.

Incredibly, I just received confirmation that next week’s meeting in the Yucatan Peninsula is still a go. The meeting planners (who, presumably, don’t have the cable package that includes CNN) have not been able to contact the hotel yet, but hey! Why assume the worst? Pack those bags, and a tent if you have one. We’re going to Cancun!

I never take much of an interest in quotidian cooking tasks, but every once in a while I like to splash out on something really impressive. It has to be something difficult, labor-intensive — artisanal, almost. The former owner of our house was a caterer, and she bequeathed to us a fantastically ugly but large and functional kitchen with a commercial range, electric oven, indoor grill, and lots of space—perfect for making big complicated meals. Italian wedding soup is my reigning piece de resistance. The broth has to sit overnight so the fat can be skimmed off. All those tiny little meatballs have to be made by hand. And it…is…good.

So the urge was coming upon me last weekend, and Husband had already vetoed (again) my suggestion to make a timpano, when I happened upon an old episode of Julia Child on PBS. Julia was cooking a chicken on a spit, and quite a production it was. She trussed that bird six ways from Tuesday, and then she demonstrated two different kinds of rotisseries, one oven-based and another free-standing. The recipe fit my cooking jones perfectly: it was needlessly complicated and involved gadgetry.

Now, it just so happened that Husband had a duck in the fridge. “Honey, do you think we could run out and buy a rotisserie?” I asked.

“I think we already have one,” he said. Sure enough, I looked in the cabinet that he directed me to and found a complete rotisserie set-up with a stand that fit over the grill, a set of skewers, and a little motor to turn the thing. Unfortunately, the motor was broken. And somehow finding an exact replacement for the motor seemed kind of daunting, so I decided to make kibbeh instead.

Kibbeh is one of the recipes, like wedding soup, that I stole from my aunts. They are Italian but grew up in an area with a number of Syrian immigrants and so have some great Middle Eastern dishes in their repetoire. Kibbeh is made with ground lamb or beef, pine nuts, bulgur wheat, and spices. There are three types of kibbeh: raw, baked, and deep-fried. I’ve never had raw kibbeh, although Husband makes a mean steak tartare and, if it’s anything similar, I’m sure raw kibbeh is delicious. But I can tell you that if there’s a choice between baked and fried, all right-thinking people choose fried. Fried kibbeh is made in the form of footballs, with a shell of meat and wheat stuffed with more meat and pine nuts. You dip them in a yogurt sauce made with lemon, garlic, olive oil, and a little mint: to die for.

In days of yore I probably would have learned these recipes in my aunts’ kitchen, but now that the family is no longer co-located I call them on the phone and try mightily to worm the details out of them. It’s hard because they cook by muscle memory and can’t always recite exact quantities or even a precise list of ingredients. You’d think e-mail would be a perfect medium for transmitting recipes, but my aunts are a bit shy of the internets. One of my aunts even has Web-TV. Remember that? When everyone was going to surf through their televisions? There are like ten subscribers left, and she is one of them. When I visited her last year, I tried to use it to send an e-mail and almost tore my hair out. Let’s just say they haven’t worked out all the kinks in adapting a web browser to a TV screen.

And I have not yet worked out all the kinks in my kibbeh recipe, as the resulting footballs were nowhere as good as Aunt Donna’s. For that reason, I don’t want to repeat the recipe here, because obviously the quantities are a bit off. But if you’re interested in making kibbeh, try this and view my little video — my Julia Child moment — that shows how to make the shells and stuff them with the filling. I’ve edited out the audio of me calling to Husband, “Don’t show my face!” Take some time to admire the white plastic countertops, the gray laminate cabinets, and the black-and-white “tile look” linoleum in the kitchen.

Here is the finished product. Deep fried footballs — doesn’t sound or even look appetizing, but it’s definitely one of my favorite meals.

Aitch is a pretty healthy kid. Even when he’s sick, he’s healthy. I have many conversations with the doctor’s office that go like this:

Me: I think I need to make an appointment for my two-year-old. He’s really crabby and irritable and whiny and wants to be held all the time. I think he must be really sick.

Nurse: Does he have a fever?

Me: No

Nurse: Runny nose?

Me: A little.

Nurse: Chest congestion?

Me: No.

Nurse: Loss of appetite?

Me: (Looking at child eating pretzels) Hmm, not really.

Nurse: Is he pulling his ear?

Me: No.

Nurse: Does he have any kind of a rash?

Me: Other than where the dog licked him trying to get a pretzel from him? No.

Nurse: (exasperated) So you have a two-year-old who’s whiny and irritable? (Thinking: Stop the presses, lady.)

Yesterday, though, after days of Aitch being sub-par but symptom-free, we finally got a sign: He threw up. Three times, each time while Daddy was holding him.

We’re not big pukers in this family. The concept of a delicate stomach is quite foreign to us. I’ve eaten my way through multiple parasitic infestations while I was in the Peace Corps, and Husband - Rappacini’s son - thrives on a steady diet of nicotine, coffee, wine, and red meat. Aitch has never thrown up before, other than a little spit-up as a baby. So we were all rather nonplussed by this turn of events.

The nice thing about Aitch being sick, though, is that he wants to be cuddled. Once it became apparent that he was ill and we figured out that all that whininess could be circumvented by holding him constantly, we settled in and began to enjoy it. We continued to whine, though, about the fact that little billable work was getting done.

When it seemed like Aitch was perking up, I even took him downtown in the Ergo carrier so he could get some fresh air and snuggle at the same time. Although I was pretty enthusiastic about the Ergo when I first got it, I haven’t been able to use it that much. Loading up the baby is pretty much a two-person job, which is not always convenient. It’s hard to interact with the baby, too, and passers-by often assume that I’m talking to myself when they can’t see I’ve got a child on my back. Most important, though, Aitch doesn’t like it. But yesterday, for the first time ever, he was content to ride in it without a constant refrain of “Downy, downy.”

And he — good, good boy — waited until AFTER we returned home to vomit for the third and final time. I don’t know what I would have done, blocks from home, with a hysterical baby and a pint of cold puke down my back.

It’s not too cold outside — mid-fifties, at the worst. It’s only a few degrees warmer in the house, though, and I feel like I have ice running through my veins. Husband and I have made a pact that we are not going to turn on the heat until our breath becomes visible, freezes mid-exhale, and breaks with a crash on the floor.

I am not usually this cheap. Last year I just tried not to think too hard about the heating bills, which rose to a whopping 25% of our mortgage payment during the worst of the winter. This year, though, natural gas prices are supposed to go even higher. Even then I might be willing to cough it up for the sake of a little comfort, but this is the most energy inefficient house on the planet and it pains me to throw that money right out the drafty windows.

Our house is fairly modest in terms of square footage. It’s a Victorian, though, and the ceilings are high; the cubic footage is killing us. The attic is not insulated, so the heat rises to the top of each room and then right through the roof. (The logical thing, at this point, would be to insulate the attic, but we are planning on renovating the attic and want to have it done all at once.) The cold air (and sometimes, snow) blows right through the windows, which may be the original 100-year-old panes for all we know. The home inspector said he had never seen anything like the window clasps, which are pretty but don’t do enough to seal the windows tightly.

Since the house is a Queen Anne (not as grand as any of these) it is definitely a window-rich environment, with little alcoves and bays jutting everywhere just for the purpose of providing more windowage. I suppose we can count ourselves lucky that there is no longer a window tax.

The house is outfitted mostly with steam heat, which is actually one of the best kinds as it provides a nice moist warmth. Unfortunately, the house only has one zone, so you can’t make one room warm and leave another cold. Theoretically you can adjust the individual radiators, but there’s not much of a difference at any point between “off” and “on.” Some of the radiators work much better than others, too, so Aitch’s room is always cold whereas the adjacent office is boiling. Last winter we kept the heat up during the night mostly for Aitch’s benefit, but without much effect. This year I’m seriously considering moving him to another room for the worst of the winter.

I feel like one of the landed gentry in a BBC adaptation of an English novel who is estate-rich but cash-poor and can’t afford to a modern heating system for his ancestral home, so he mopes around in thick tweeds, nursing his rheumatism with stout cups of hot tea and applying poultices to his chilblains. You find yourself yelling at the screen, “Sell a few hundred acres and buy a boiler, dude!” but he either won’t because he’s too proud, or can’t because the estate is entailed, or otherwise encumbered with some such obscure British legal complication. So he plots to marry an heiress to finance the necessary upkeep.

On the other hand, I feel more like the heiress who has sacrificed her fortune to this money pit, and is still walking around in ugly tweeds, shivering.

Don’t get me wrong; It’s not like I expect anyone to feel sorry for me. We bought the house with full knowledge of its shortcomings and a realistic estimate of the heating bills (although we couldn’t have predicted Katrina). When the time comes I will fire up the boiler, albeit with a grudge in my soul. I’m not expecting donations or anything. Well, you’re free to send me a donation, but if you do I’ll put it towards some new leather boots, not early fall heat.

Early this morning in Port City, an unknown celestial object was spotted in the eastern sky. Villagers consulted official records, but could find no mention of the star’s prior appearance. Many were frightened by this singular occurrence, convinced that it was a sign of divine displeasure for some collective sin — not approving the parking garage, perhaps. Others were cheered by its radiant aspect and bravely (some say, foolhardily) ventured out of doors to bathe in its glow.

Only time will tell if this cosmic event bodes good or ill.

Aitch wakes up kind of crabby, just like everyone else in the house, so on mornings when I just don’t feel like a lot of hassle I enter his room with a sippy cup and a plan. “Do you want to go downstairs and get a muffin?” I warble, for example.

If I’ve hit on something that passes muster, we’re good to go. However, I have to be careful not to mention any other activity before Aitch has had a chance to complete the first one. For example, if on the way down the stairs, I mention, “Then we’re going to the playground!” or “After that we’ll go to school!” Aitch will freak. I’ve finally figured out that, in his mind, I’m changing the plan. I said “muffin,” he heard “muffin,” and we’re not deviating from the “muffin” protocol, goddamn it! He has a general grasp on the concept of “future,” but not when there are muffins involved in the short term.

Aitch, though, has been making great strides with the idea of “past.” We’ll sometimes review his day with him: “Do you remember when we saw the seals in the water? And the one seal was swimming upside down?” He will often respond with something like, “Seals? Done.” This utterance is accompanied by a dismissive wave of the hand and a few more repetitions for emphasis: “Done, seals. Seals? Done.” As far as I can tell, he is using “done” as a marker of tense, which I think is very clever for a kid who mostly avoids verbs.

Aitch also increasingly uses “done” to compartmentalize scary experiences. With Halloween on the horizon he is sometimes frightened by scarecrow or jack o’lantern or costume display. For example, the other day we lost Gordon on a shopping expedition, and I had to traipse Aitch back through the store to look for him. (Yes, I realize “traipse” is not a transitive verb, but believe me I was traipsing him). During the search Aitch spotted a figure dressed up like a zombie and became agitated: “Man? Man?” We left the aisle and I told him not to worry about the man; he’s “all gone.” As luck would have it we never did find Gordon (kicking self), and Husband was kind enough to replace him (kicking self harder, as Gordons cost upwards of $18. New rule: Gordon does not leave the Isle of Sodor). Now when Aitch sees his new Gordon, he remembers “Daddy Gordon Gordon Daddy new” (translation: Daddy bought me a new Gordon–not sure why the repetition), and then recalls the zombie we saw when looking for him: “Man? Done. Done, man. All gone man. Done. Done.”

It’s amazing what he can convey with just a few words. I think I’ll be a little sad when he finally masters linking verbs.