Livingston, I Presume

Lordy, lordy...guess who's 40?

I distinctly remember the moment I learned what real love is. I was probably about 11, and I was clearing the table with my parents after dinner. Okay, since I was 11, there was a good chance I was rolling my eyes and bitching about having to clear the table with my parents after dinner, but bear with me. Bringing the plates to the sink, the condiments to the refrigerator, my parents began to argue about who was going to do the dishes. Not one trying to pawn the task off on the other, mind--fighting spiritedly to be allowed to do the dishes. I think the dialog went something like this:

Dad: I'll get started on these dishes then.

Mom: No, no! Let me do it!

Dad: Don't be silly. I want to do it!

Mom: Please. I'm dying to wash the dishes so you don't have to.

Dad: I'm cleaning the kitchen and that's final!

In the end, they cleaned the kitchen together, as they always did--except for wiping down the counters, which was my job and which I performed with such haphazard, put-upon "tween" attitude that it's a real shocker I made it to 12. But the shocker for me at the time was that two people could actually care enough about each other to want to clean so the other wouldn't have to.

My parents have the kind of love story that isn't really supposed to exist in this day and age. They started dating while they were in high school--just 15 and 16 years old--and got married while they were still in college. They waited a scandalously long six years to have their first child--a.k.a. me--and given the trouble I caused, it's no wonder Alex didn't come along for another seven years after that.

In a generation when women were working outside the home in larger numbers than ever before--but still coming home and being expected to do all the cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing--my house was very different. I don't think I really understood that traditional "gender roles" existed until I started seeing them at other people's houses. My dad cooked breakfast for the family every morning, and we're not talking setting cereal boxes on the table. There were fruit sculptures and heart-shaped eggs and messages written in ham. I would also estimate that we sat down together as a family in the dining room for two meals a day about 99 percent of the time.

If there was rancor over division of labor, I never saw it. They work together like a well-oiled machine. When they came to help us out in Prague after Connery was born, Chip and I--when we weren't passing out from lack of sleep--would marvel at their coordination while they were cooking or cleaning. We've often said that if my parents hadn't shown up at that point, Connery probably would have survived, but Chip and I would have starved to death in our own filth.

My parents--those dish-arguing, fruit-sculpting high school sweethearts!--will be celebrating their 40th anniversary this weekend. We'll be going to Great Falls to help them celebrate. I am thankful every day to have the example of their love. It's a high bar, to be sure, but one that is worth the striving.

What is to be done?*

So this is Connery's last week at the preschool/daycare that he has been attending since he was 15 months old. As far as I know the school is the only employer-sponsored, on-site daycare in Montana, and it has been a wonderful resource for us. Finding quality childcare, especially in a smaller town, can be hugely problematic. We've been so fortunate to have this option open to us.

Now that he's getting ready to leave, we'd like to do something special for the school and especially for his two classroom teachers. There will be a little party on Friday, and I'm wracking my brain trying to think of something meaningful and creative to give to the women who have helped us take care of Connery for almost three years.

Does anyone have any thoughts? I'd be grateful to hear from anyone who's been through this or just might have some good ideas.

*I figured enough time had elapsed from my time at a magazine covering Russia to be able to use that headline without gagging.

Somebody make a citizen's arrest

Clearly, my blogging license (blicense?) needs to be revoked. I have no excuses beyond the standard blah blah I write for a living and don't want to write after I'm done writing five articles blah blah. Compelling stuff, I know.

The good news is that the weather has finally become wonderful, with only a few days of summer left. Wonderful for me may not compute with other people, since the outside temperature at 6:15 this morning was only six degrees above freezing. I like this...others do not. Presumably the fire crews find it easier, and that alone makes it all worth it.

We're ramping up for the new school year, which for the first time since, oh, 1997 actually means something. Connery's Montessori preschool starts the Tuesday after Labor Day, and while his schedule isn't going to be terribly different from what he's been doing, the prospect of sending him off every day with a lunch box and the expectation of learning lessons does feel odd. He's totally ready to go, but Mom and Dad are having a little more trouble. Get used to it, huh?

Here's to more inspiration tomorrow and in the days to come.

That's what grown-up folk do

I was helping Connery get ready for bed last night when he revealed to me a small measure of how we are shaping his worldview. After much running about and shrieking--in a happy way--he finally achieved buck-nakedness. Thus unclad, he clambered onto his bed and lay there like some 16th-century model ready for a long session with his favorite Renassiance painter. When I asked him what he was doing, he replied, "I'm being a grown-up."

Interesting.

Edited to add for clarification in case of reading by CPS-types: Nudity = Grownups because of the sleeping and the nakedness while in that state. Geez.

Making the Foreigners' Police look good

Slate has published an unbelievable first-person account of one man's struggle to get a U.S. passport. Could be yet another ho-hum tale of a huddled mass member yearning to be free and live the American dream except for one thing: The man in question, Bruce Reed, is in fact an American citizen and is merely trying to get his own passport--and those of his family--renewed in time for a planned trip to Australia. That sort of thing used to take a few weeks; now, with the new passport requirements that mandate U.S. citizens have a passport if they're flying to Mexico, Canada, or the Caribbean, it can take not just months but many months. Sometimes longer.

Reed and his family applied--and paid--for rush passport delivery a full two months before their departure. It was not enough, not by a long shot. By the day of the intended trip, he still had not received the passports--despite many promises to the contrary by officials staffing the overjammed phone lines--and headed for his last hope: a Washington-based passport office. Here's how he describes it:

The scene bore a passing resemblance to the fall of Saigon. Some people were crying. Others were screaming, either at agents or at the armed guards who herded us from one spot to another until the room became too packed to move. A few travelers were in more advanced stages of resignation, sitting on the floor staring at books of Sudoku or simply praying the dwindling supply of oxygen would hold out long enough.

Hyperbole, surely, but having spent some time in the passport office at the U.S. Embassy in Prague, I'd say it's probably not that exaggerated. He waited nearly three hours before being able to see someone, and that's where I very nearly fell off my chair with mingled laughter and horror:

I reached the caseworker window in a mere 150 minutes, still with a faint hope of making an evening flight. But the agent at Window 8 had other plans. She angrily questioned why I needed a passport that day, when my flight wouldn't land in Australia until two days later. I tried to explain the International Date Line, but she had already reached a verdict: Our passports couldn't possibly be done in time for us to leave, so that meant she had no obligation to complete them. And since the office was closing for the weekend, she gave me a slip to come back for them—on Monday.

Seriously? There is seriously someone working in the passport office who doesn't understand that a flight all the way to goddamn Australia can't be done in a single calendar day? I think that frightens me more than zombie fat and semi drivers yakking on cell phones.

Reading the whole thing gave me an immediate flashback to the hellish bureaucracy that occasionally characterized life in the Czech Republic. The old jokes were that Kafka was a journalist, not a novelist and that the way official things worked in that country was the result of the unholy union between the Austro-Hungarian and Communist bureaucracies. Even so, and maybe this is nearly three years away talking, I don't remember things being as terrible as Reed's passport experience was.

Oh, we had some doozies, for sure. Having to get Connery and me--a scant six days post-partum and only a day after we'd been released from one hospital--to a separate Prague hospital miles across town to undergo blood tests and physical exams to get Connery's insurance stands out as a real low point.  Finding out that I had been accidentally living illegally in Prague and would have to pay a fine was another. Still, once you figured out the system, navigating was occasionally time-consuming but not soul-crushing.

I tell you what, U.S. passport office, when you start making me feel nostalgic about Czech bureaucracy, you have a big problem. My passport is up for renewal in 2013. I'd better get on that now.

Not-so-New-Year's resolution

My home office is not exactly an oasis of calm and productivity. More like that place where the whole family dumps the shit they don't know where else to put. Last summer I did the typical rookie organizer thing and went out and bought new file boxes and shelves and other Get Organized Now! porn, and there they sit, even now, on the floor of my office, mocking my sad attempts:

See, even the Inflatable Scream Doll is embarrassed at my lack of progress. And yes, that is a plastic pirate ship. Why do you ask?

The new file boxes do not hold, as I had planned, meticulously filed copies of my published work or even household finance records. No, those are all over my floor, because otherwise the floor would have no decoration at all, and then where would we be?

The boxes' other purpose is to save nails and--undoubtedly--the eventual necessary spackle that would result from actually, you know, hanging the lovely Monte Dolack print of Main Hall. We can't be putting nail holes in the wall of a house we own.

There's the wider view, including what appears to be a desk owned by the sanest person in the world--if the old saw about clean desk being the product of a sick mind holds any water at all. (Don't you believe it!) If you look closely, you may be able to steal my identity by going through the collected bills alongside. Could you steal possession of my student loans while you're at it?

The closet also mocks me:

Look at all that empty space! I can hear you saying. Well, yes. Because that's where the shelves to hold the files boxes are to go. The shelves that are currently upside down in the garage. Oh, and more art! Because art doesn't belong on the wall--it's really more of a floor thing.

Note that Gorby (top shelf, far left) has fainted from the sheer terror of the place. (Note also the original, circa 1979 Dancerella doll with box! I'll be taking bids in the comments. Don't let me down.)

The big question is what I'm going to do about this space. I spend so much time in here during the week that I would really like to shut the door on Friday afternoon and not come back in until Monday, which makes working on it somewhat daunting. Regardless of the daunt, however, I'm trying to psych myself up to beginning the process. I figured some public humiliation couldn't hurt.

Anybody want to come rescue me from my office?

From the department of DUH

Via Salon's Machinist blog comes the not-so-startling news that "educational" DVDs for kids may not result in actual Baby Einsteins. Scientists at the University of Washington found, in the words of Farhad Manjoo, that:

Babies who watch the videos are less verbally proficient than those who do not; researchers found that for every hour that an infant between 8 to 16 months old spends watching a brain DVD, he understands, on average, 6 to 8 fewer words than a kid who didn't do Einstein.

As far as I'm concerned, you don't have to be any kind of scientist--rocket or otherwise--to figure out that these income-sucking DVDs are providing valuable time for parents to make dinner or...you know...blog. That's it. Dancing chickens do not a genius make, people. Of the available, expensive raft of "edutainment" offerings out there, we have found utility in only one: A Baby Einstein CD set of lullabies and other relaxing music. That set put Connery to sleep for at least the first two years of his life, while--undoubtedly--sowing the seeds for raw intellectual firepower due to the subliminal hypnotic suggestion of the magical Mozart.

Mozart is magical--music is magical--but not for any debunked effect on babies' brains. It's such a typically American thing, actually, to take something that the rest of the world enjoys on its merits--music, art, architecture--and try to turn it into a tool. We can't just have kids listening to and enjoying music, we have to use it to help them get into Harvard someday.

And now that parents have been told again and again that TV is verboten for young kids, it's easy to see why it would be comforting to think that your kids were actually learning something rather than having their brains rotted. It's all or nothing, baby. The American Way. If you let your kid watch television, you're a bad parent--or so we've been told. So instead of trying to come up with a common-sense approach--Gosh, maybe an hour of Sesame Street a couple of days a week isn't going to relegate her to a life of Gentlewoman's Cs--we try to circumvent the restrictions by creating "educational" children's programming. Now it's not just OK to let Baby tune in, it's actually neglectful not to, so you'd better get yourself to Costco to by that $179.99 Baby Einstein box set.

Maybe this study--common-sensical as it may seem--could be a start to breaking that cycle. But I wouldn't count on it. If there's one thing we Americans don't know how to do (besides take enough vacations) it's exhibit anything approaching moderation.

What I did on my summer vacation, lessons learned edition

Nothing.

And it was glorious.

OK, so not entirely nothing. We did drive a couple hundred miles to reach my parents' cabin in Condon, and then another hundred miles (or what felt like it on the requisite dusty, bumpy, gravelly roads) to Ashley Lake to spend a few days at the Ritter family reunion. Highlights included near-daily naps, good company, and lots of Scrabble. We did, however, learn something, just as if our vacation had been some kind of extended sitcom. Below please find our many lessons:

• Vacationing with a child is never quite as relaxing as you think it's going to be. Relaxation, in truth, requires days off for Mom and Dad while child remains in preschool. But that's hard to do when you actually leave the area.
• Montana sure is purdy, even when half the state is going up in flames.
• Nine times out of ten, my mom will still beat me in Scrabble. But the practice of playing against her means that at least nine and a half times out of ten, I will beat anyone who is not my mom.
• Marshmallows roasted over a propane grill? Not quite as exciting but infinitely safer than campfire-toasted.
• I will never drown, as I am my own personal flotation device.
• How Harry Potter ends, without spoilers. (And I'm not telling!)
• "Sleeps eight comfortably" is only useful information if the term "comfortably" is defined. For example, "Sleeps eight comfortably if you are in college and routinely pass out on friends' couches" or "Sleeps eight comfortably if you don't actually like sleeping with your husband" or "Sleeps eight comfortably if you can also fall asleep in airport terminals and other crowded venues" would all be vast improvement on that vague first sentiment and a darn sight more honest.
• Most people can't be trusted around orange food.
• Jennifer Weiner has serious male abandonment and sister issues that she should probably work through outside her fiction, but that doesn't stop her writing from being entertaining and enjoyable.
• The only clothes you really, really need to pack when you're going camping/cabin-ing are clean underwear for each day. Even so, I managed to forget mine at home. Thank god for Kalispell.
• People in laundromats (see above underwear lesson) tend to be rude the world over.
• I know I already said it, but Montana really is magnificent. Which makes this early, scary fire season all the worse. Say a little prayer or send us some good thoughts. Maybe pray for rain. Hell, I'd take snow.