ever-fixed mark

I have always thought that listening to a book is like being fed through an NG tube: aces in an emergency, but not the preferred content delivery method.

The boredom accruing to a year’s worth of commuting, though, has come to seem like an emergency crying out for some audio relief. I looked into audiobooks; they were quite expensive, though, for something I wasn’t entirely sure I would enjoy. I wondered if there were any free audiobooks, much like free podcasts.

There are. Librivox.org records books in the public domain — old books, but that’s mostly what I enjoy anyway. I downloaded an English translation of a French nineteenth-century detective story, The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux. To my astonishment, I was completely captivated. It was pure police procedural, and I had to listen carefully to take in all the clues. The miles flew by.

Oddly, to my ear, different chapters were read by different narrators, and some of the narrators were clearly not native English speakers, although that was an advantage for some with all the French names in Yellow Room. I logged on to librivox.org to see if I could divine the reason, and as it turns out, all the readers are volunteers. Anyone with a pulse, a computer, and a microphone can contribute one or more chapters to the public domain audiobook of his or her choice.

Upon learning this, I had a crazy idea. What if I read a chapter? One the one hand, I’ve always loved reading out loud. On the other hand, I have something of a tortured voice. I can enunciate clearly and read fluently, but the sound, due to some biomechanical fault, is distinctly unmelodious.

But, hell. I don’t have to listen to it!

So the next time you’re on a long road trip, and the kids are clamoring for the next installment of the Palliser series (”Mommy! We’re dying to know…does Phineas Finn get back into Parliament?”) note that Chapter 12 of Phineas Redux is yours truly.

At 4:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, I was jolted from sleep by a smoke detector. We had already been through one round of Musical Beds; thus I was confused both by the sound and by finding myself in our guest room. Husband and I met in the hall, and he took a quick tour to sniff for smoke while I stayed with the kids. We couldn’t smell anything, but I called the fire department anyway, knowing I wouldn’t be able to go happily back to sleep while suspecting that a fire was smoldering in the basement or behind the walls.

The dispatcher told me to get everyone out of the house and wait for the fire truck. We grabbed blankets for the kids and took them outside on the porch.

That’s when they woke up.

See, we usually cook dinner for ourselves after the boys go to bed at night. About once every two weeks, this activity sets off the fire alarm. The boys have become so habituated to the sound that they now sleep right through it.

I always thought this was a good thing, but now I realize that when they move out and live on their own, they’ll have to install the kind of smoke detectors that flash lights and shake the bed.

The parking garage at work is five blocks away from my office building, but there’s a really terrific coffee shop between points A and B. The proprietors are Moroccan, and because their dialect and demeanor are so close to Tunisian I feel very much at home there.

I usually stop for a hot coffee on my way into work in the morning and for an iced latte on my way home. I always get one of those cardboard jacket thingies for the cup because I don’t want to burn my hand as I walk to the office, or freeze it as I walk to the car.

Suddenly, today, that seemed so absurd. I thought about drinking coffee in Tunisia, where a cup was a sit-down affair, not a perambulatory accessory. I always had my direkt in a small glass, and on a cold day I would have wrapped my hands around it to draw out the warmth, storing it up against an evening in an unheated apartment. On hot days, if I ordered a Fanta from the refrigerator, I would have held the bottle against my wrist to cool the maximum amount of blood before drinking it and going out into the sun-parched streets.

I’m not discounting the wonders of modern HVAC, but sometimes I do feel my life has become a little too insulated.

During the kindergarten run the other day, I caught a snippet of an NPR segment that had me in stitches. The topic was the Catholic priesthood, and there was the usual discussion about the decline in numbers and the effect that rescinding the celibacy requirement might have upon the ministry.

One poor misguided soul maintained, though, that celibacy was NOT the thing keeping the young lads away in droves. The problem, he said, was that the Catholic church had grown too liberal, and this was scaring off men who might otherwise have a vocation.

Yes, you can just imagine that thought process: “Poverty, chastity, obedience….hmmm, not nearly medieval enough for me.”

This morning, when I walked out of the parking garage at work, I was confronted by a mother duck and eight ducklings, just hanging out together on in the middle of Cambridge.

I called Husband and told him of my find. “Are they named Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack, and Quack?” he asked.

“They’re standing on a curb, and I’m afraid they’re going to waddle into the street and get run over,” I said.

“Why don’t you call Officer Clancy?” he said oh so helpfully.

The mama duck looked very confused, as though she had taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque. The funny thing is that the ducks were only about half a mile from the island near the Longfellow Bridge where the ducklings in the book make their original home. They had traveled in the opposite direction from the Public Garden, though.

Am I the only person in the Boston area who is not that fond of Make Way for Ducklings? I find the back-ing and forth-ing of the ducks kind of confusing. They visit and reject the Public Garden, then end up at some nameless island in the river, and then…why did they go back to the Public Garden again? Why not just set the whole thing at the Public Garden and contrive some other reason for the ducklings to cross the street?

Apparently I’m not the only one.

On the days I pick up Aitch from school, we sometimes hang out at the playground for a half-hour or so afterwards. He plays while I chitchat with the other parents. I find it strangely awkward to be in a social situation where I am on a “nodding acquaintance” basis with so many people. It’s easy to talk to people you know; it’s easy to ignore people you don’t know. What’s hard is talking to, or ignoring, people you sorta know.

There’s one group of kindergarten mothers there who are very good friends. I think of them as the Mommy Posse, or the Mosse. They’re not the Mean Girls; you can walk up and join them, and they’ll be perfectly friendly. (I want to be clear on that; I can’t stand how whenever more than two women are in the same room, people start using words like “catty” and “cliquey.” I participate in a lot of groups — book club and the dog-walking group and the movie night contingent — and all of them are perfectly civilized.) It soon becomes evident, though, that the Mosse is tightly intertwined, and it’s hard to join the conversation when it’s all about what they’re doing that evening, or after soccer on Saturday, or for brunch before church on Sunday. They’re not trying to be exclusive, but they are friends, whereas the rest of us are just other mothers who happens to be standing in their vicinity.

At times, I’m envious of the Mosse. It would be nice to have a permanent group of friends, and for the boys to have permanent playmates. Imagine: we would never have to go out of our way to arrange a play date (something I’m bad about doing in advance) or a parents’ night out with another couple. We would always know what we were doing on the weekend.

On the other hand, the Mosse seems like a commitment I probably couldn’t handle. That’s a lot of Cheever-esque suburban togetherness. Let’s be honest: I wasn’t good with exclusive social groups in high school, and I’m probably not any better with them now. I have my groups, as noted above, but I don’t want to hang out with any of them on a permanent basis.

Do you have a Mosse? If so, what are the advantages and disadvantages? If not, would you join one if you could, or do you consciously keep away?

Our neighbors who live two houses down invited us to a Kentucky Derby/Cinco de Mayo party yesterday— mint juleps and nachos. It was an afternoon-sliding-into-evening, kids-plus-adults affair. There must have been 20 small boys between the ages of 2 and 10 there, and our guys had a blast. The adults mostly hung out on the back patio while the throng of boys ran from the front yard through the house and out the side door, brandishing croquet mallets. As long as no one was crying, we were happy to leave them to their own devices, and consequently throughout the afternoon we went ten and twenty minutes at a time without seeing them.

At one point Husband walked into the alley to have a cigarette, and he spotted Aitch coming out the back door of our house. “What are you doing in there?” he asked, thinking perhaps I had walked Aitch over for some reason.

“We’re having a party at my house!” Aitch said with pride. Husband and he went into the house just in time to see ten or so little Lords of the Flies exiting through the front door.

Apparently, Aitch had lured them over en masse and they spent a happy unsupervised half-hour playing cars and eating tortilla chips they had brought from the real party. There was a trail of chip crumbs across the floor. Also (I am not making this up), one of the five-year-olds had thrown up in the bathroom.

Husband summed up the situation in a word: “Harbinger,” he said.