Magnificent Bastard

Saturday night was the debut of my husband’s band, Magnificent Bastard at the local watering hole, The Hummingbird, my first night out with adult beverages and a babysitter in months and a late-night party back at our place that went until dawn. Although I was up late, I had little to drink and thus enjoyed more of the evening, night, dawn, early morning and the next day than I had expected. So I have a couple of realizations:

1) Some might say that my husband was always a magnificent bastard, but now he’s proclaimed it to the world and is making quite a splash being one. I have to admit it’s kind of sexy. Don’t know why and my feminist friends will probably bother me about it.

2) The band I’ve been listening to through a door, wall and floor sound better live on a decent stage with a sound system. They really are good. I suspected it, but can’t really tell when I’m listening to them behind the TV through all the soundproofing.

3) I can still drink, but my long abstinence has taught me that it’s not necessary to drink to excess. Just because some is good does not mean that more is better. I am nevertheless way too fucking old to stay up partying til six am whether or not my last two beverages were cups of orange juice.

4) I really do like the guys in the band. On top of being great musicians, they’re each and every one of them absolutely cool, smart and fun guys. This would not be important unless you realize that I spend two evenings a week with them one way or the other and because they’re cool, I don’t even mind the noise.

5) Connor loves music. I wonder if its because he hears so much of it behind doors, floors and walls. To hear it live and clear must be like having an RCA crank phonograph get traded in for a Kenwood stereo with Bose speakers.

6) I still love music, love going out and hanging out, but don’t love tight crowds, fussy old biddies who sit at a bar packed three deep with people trying to get drinks and then give you a dirty look when you brush their sleeves, or freeloaders who tip up and guzzle from the one bottle of bourbon you haven’t finished by 1am, when folks are still coming in to the party. I should have slapped that boy.

7) I owe the overworked and very busy folks at The Rookery an apology. I forgot that my friend paid our second tab and that I had given her cash. No-one needed to go looking for that second credit card receipt as busy as they were.

8) Personal thanks to my trainer, BJ, by whose hard work I was able to wear a pair of jeans on Saturday without giving myself a hernia.

Okay, back to school now and serious things of the mind. Just thought I’d say thanks to Magnificent Bastard for a great show.

Back to School

Clarity and closets rarely mix. It was both wrong and sad when I found that I liked my maternity wardrobe better than my real clothes. Of course, these days that doesn’t mean pastel blue checked frocked blouses with bunnies on them, but rather sleek, fitted little nothings in black, red, turquoise and paisleyed or swirled polka-dots. Friends from everywhere sent me choice bits from their own round-bellyed days and voila – cuts and colors I would have never attempted on my own. It was about time for that wake-up call. Something had to be done with the graying collection of black t-shirts, the fraying cuffs and seams of seven-year old white collared shirts, and the sweaters that had never quite fit right. Now that I’ve given up the maternity collection, I miss those colors and patterns like you miss curried lamb after eating bologna sandwiches.

Henry David Thoreau once said, “I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes and not rather a new wearer of clothes.” School kids everywhere often sympathize, though for my three sisters and I this was an exciting season of housekeeping on our wardrobes. After the flurry of trying on everything last stitch in our closets, there was the haggling on shopping day for the jeans, shoes and coolest shirt you would live in for the next year. As the eldest, I suffered from usually handing down more than I could get out of tight budgets, but with some flexibility, a deft needle and a yen for vintage (old) clothes, I managed a middling sartorial presence – nothing brilliant, but passable. Thank God for Cindi Lauper and Madonna. Back in 1985, you could literally wear anything and get away with it.

Several jobs later, I found I had nonetheless never properly learned to shop. The Air Force gave me several suits it wanted me to be proud in, my sister gave me her collection of khakis that she outgrew in high school, Mom bought me my first work clothes and by the time I hit grad school, everything just had to be clean and not look like I’d slept in it. But then, up in New York, hip meant anything not overly pressed, matching or untextured – read suburban. We were intellectuals, we could sometimes be rumpled; it added panache to otherwise distressed wardrobes. With a debt load into five figures and no end in sight, we tended to react with neurotic caution. When we blew our cool (and our loan check) on clothing, it had to last. I still have half the stuff from that ill-advised Limited expedition nine years ago, but then I had a friend with a company discount and chose classic pieces.

Then last week, I returned from my California trip wherein I’d lived out of half of a carry-on suitcase, the other half being devoted to Connor’s onesies, rice cereal and little shoes. I had used the same strategy for when I packed for Europe: set out what you think you need and put half of it back. It works every time and you find you don’t overpack. I found I could have cut even that in half. What half of a carryon case teaches you about your clothes is that you have far too many of them sitting around that you don’t use. I came home and raked my closets for all the detritus and tore four garbage bags off the shelves and racks. I find, too, that I haven’t really lost anything, just the crap that was too old, the wrong size or that I’d never really liked.

I’d like to do the same for the rest of my house: broken-handled cups, the gadgets that don’t work, the pasta that’s been in the cupboard for a year, camping gear that we didn’t use last time and probably won’t ever use, knickknacks in drawers, old magazines. I used to do this every time I moved. As a student that was about every 2-four years. Having settled, I find that a clattering layer of plaque has collected in the cupboards and drawers of my home, obscuring those things I do use and making my head feel dusty and cluttered. So the ritual is the same even if the collection has telescoped from shoes, clothes and hair ribbons to blenders and candleholders.

There something still in my internal clock that clears the junk, cleans house, irons shirts, sharpens pencils, lays in canned veggies and a new box of tea and gets ready for the new school year. Summer’s been wonderful, but its scattered loose logics give way to an orderly readiness, the crisp white shirt effect, of the Fall. Of Excel spreadsheets of new budgets, of new files for the piles on the desk (baby sitters, receipts) and of new tasks and resolutions: Finish the bloody manuscript of the book, don’t stay up too late, start looking at pre-schools, test-drive a larger car. Each year’s ritual is a preparation for growth, a clearing of the deck for the next challenge. It makes me wonder whether the divestiture of things isn’t immediately connected to growth.

So my job this fall is to throw out a lot of junk and buy one sleek, sassy dress that I love. Maybe two. What the heck, I’ve got a lot of space in my closet now.

Road Songs

There we were. It was 5:24pm on Thursday when we ended up in LA rush hour traffic with Connor screaming with all of his five-month-old might and the planes-trains-automobiles weary Dan and I trying to bargain with the gods. “Please just let him fall asleep,” I prayed, “I’ll never touch a drop of red wine again.” Of course that still leaves white wine, and so the gods were unwilling. Connor screamed on. So I did something I swore on several different counts for several different reasons that I’d never do: I unbuckled my seatbelt (please Officer W, don’t lecture, I know I shouldn’t have), climbed into the back seat and sat there the rest of the way, soothing my son. Dan and I said we’d never sit me in the back on a trip. It was over-indulgent to the baby and demeaning to women everywhere -- like walking twelve paces behind the husband and male children. Yet, travel weary people are willing to cut deals, and Dan and I ate crow on this one along with our In-and-Out burgers. It wasn’t the first time and won’t be the last.

I am learning how many crazy things parents do that make no sense to the uninitiated that eventually become casual faire to those new at the game. To be fair, this was one of only two or three 20-minute rough patches in an otherwise idyllic vacation. Connor flew well and dropped off to sleep regularly at his 9:30 bedtime, despite the time change. But to be sure, I rode in the back seat on the drive from Los Angeles to Palo Alto, a six hour drive. It was fun, in a way, playing with him, reading to him, feeding him bottles and goop from little containers. Connor has decided that he prefers food to milk (you can’t call it “solid food” as there’s nothing solid about baby food), so we tasted squash and sweet potatoes, pears and peaches, rice cereal and applesauce. In a moment of pure parental slapstick, he blew a raspberry while I was feeding him squash, splattering the pristine back seat of the rental car and me with orange muck. I found it in my clothes, my hair, in the pages of the book I’d been reading.

And my good friend from Palo Alto, the lovely Ms. M., said that I seem to be parenting effortlessly. Well, I was on vacation. You can laugh about sprayed squash on vacation. In my nasty little backbrain, I worry about how funny it will be at 7:59 when I’m scrambling out of the house to go teach on a Monday morning. Nonetheless, we were all on vacation together, driving and eating and singing. From LA to Sacramento, we visited relatives, stopped in on friends, saw my Grandmother hold Connor in Whittier, drank too much wine and stayed up too late in Palo Alto, watched the sun set and the city lights come up in San Francisco while we ate Fresh Salmon in Daly City, ate Sushi and got lost in ‘Frisco -- driving blind and grousing at each other at the interchange of the 1 and the 280 that we miss again and again, ate Black Forest ham with my aunt and uncle at their ranch in Herald, and partied down with 20 of our old friends and their children in a Sacramento Babypalooza, eating chicken and drinking Aviators and Sierra Nevada while watching the little ones scrabble around with sidewalk chalk and legos.

It was a lot of driving but it was fun – our first family roadtrip. Dan was surprised to find I’d made up a song for the baby:

“There once was a wee little laddy named Connor,
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey . . .”

It’s a song I made up in the shower to keep him happy enough in his Fisher Price Aquarium bouncy chair so that I could at least rinse the shampoo out of my hair and get most of a leg shaved before he started to scream. Singing soothed him, and so I brought out what I could remember of the old Broadway tunes, some of my favorite Police songs, melodies and ditties from favorite moments throughout life. But this one was all Connor’s. He loves to hear the repetition of his name and know that I’m singing to and about him. The versus are fun, too, with a piratical sea chanty turn about them, with our fictitious hero traveling the world to taste the food, wine, women and song of the seven seas, or at least old towns Dan and I have visited or lived in:

“One day he sailed off to the Isle of Manhattan,
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey
He said, ‘give me a coat now that’s cut in the fashion’"

The kid loves it.

And I’m starting to think, not of those things I swore as a young (and not so young) married chick with time to paint her nails, read the PMLA cover to cover, and sit on the porch without interruption, that I’d never do. But about those I didn’t think I’d get to do. Making up songs with the baby is fun. I was worried that the pressures of writing critical articles, having something intelligent to say despite the mashed sweet potato on my shoulder, and keeping clean a house that gathers dust, houseguests, and dead bugs faster than I can blink, would suck a lot of the joy out of my life. Indeed, it probably will, but there’s always the naughty little song, the picture book or the gooey little kiss and wiggly monkey-baby hug to ease the trouble of the road.

Like all road trips, my summer off with Connor is about to come to an end. It’s time to get back to real life: go back to school, start with the syllabi and paper assignments, bring on the Nanny and iron the white shirts with stiff collars. But it’s been a nice summer, a new trip, another road. We got lost a couple of times, sure, but we had fun, ate some strange things on the road, sang some songs and slept in late. Someday Connor will take his road trips without his Momma, but til then, it’s been a nice ride.

Connor's Song:
"The Roving Sailor"
There Once was a wee little laddy named Connor
Ahoy, ahoy, oh matey
He swam and he sailed he was not a land lubber
Ahoy, ahoy, oh matey
He swam with the fishes, he sailed a small boat and he danced with the wind
Ahoy, ahoy, oh matey

On day when the sun was out shining brightly
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey
He took his small boat and he went to the islands,
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey
He fried some plaintain and he ate some bananas and drank all the rum
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey

One day he sailed of to the small town of ‘Frisco,
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey
He said “give me some chowder that’s not made with Crisco
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey
He stayed at the Fairmont and ate all the sushi and drank all the wine
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey

One day he went up to his Mum’s town Sacramento,
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey
He said “give me a breakfast that’s got some tomato”
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey
He stayed at the Hyatt and ate all the chicken and drank all the beer
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey

One day he sailed off to the Isle of Manhattan,
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey
He said, “give me a coat now that’s cut in the fashion”
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey
He drank a martini, and ate a strip steak and danced at the Ritz
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey

(Dan’s verse)
He got on the F train and went down to Brooklyn
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey
They asked “Are you buying,” he said “no, I’m just lookin.”
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey
He crossed the Gawanus, down Fifth Avenue and he found his Dad’s bar
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey

One day he sailed up to the small town of Macon
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey
Said “give me some barbecue, chicken and bacon”
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey
He stayed at the Plaza and drank all the bourbon and stayed up til dawn
Ahoy, Ahoy, oh Matey

Packing Heat

Ack! Argh! Okay, before the philosophers get too pissed and folks think it’s okay to cater to this anti-intellectualism that’s so de rigueur in this country: philosophers do not talk nonsense. They just don’t always have room for babies in their philosophies. For fathers, yes; for women, sometimes. For babies, almost never. Why is this? Is it the poo that puts them off?

I think on this as I’m making a list of what to take on our annual pilgrimage to California, which used to be my home but is now just where all of my family and a lot of old friends live. My home was California ten years ago and it’s a very different place now. The Terminator is Governor and the state is divided not over the flow of water, but of Mexican immigrants. Nonetheless, we have some ill, disabled, broke or “way-too-busy-with-work-and/ or-multiple-toddlers” folks who haven’t met Connor yet. Some of them are grandparents, and one of them is my Dad, an actual rocket scientist (no kidding!) who’s also taking care of my grandmother and a sick girlfriend. My husband thinks I’m insane for attempting it and I can’t figure out how to tell him I couldn’t not. Like Salmon going upstream, I go to California in the Summer. I pack, I leave one kind of heat for another, I go bake in the Central Valley or freeze my ass off in the San Francisco summer. Mark Twain once said that the coldest winter he ever spent was the summer he spent in San Francisco. I’ve now spent two since my mother moved there, but the post-baby ass is persistent.

Packing for a couple of weeks for myself was no big deal – a carry-on and a computer bag. For an infant, it’s ridiculous. I’m shipping a box of diapers and rice cereal to LA where we’ll begin our trip, but we’ll be checking Connor's car seat and his travel bed (doubles as a play pen, nap zone, nighttime retreat and safety zone for non-drool-proofed houses). His little clothes will take hardly any space at all. His gear will take more than all of our clothes put together. Most philosophers have never traveled with an infant as their primary responsibility so the qualities of one pac-n-play over another have no importance to them. To me it's everything. They do not have to choose between a backpack and diaper bag for daytime use, wondering what they would carry keys, bottles, diapers, and a wallet in should they go to dinner with said infant. The mind boggles. The smallest inclusion or deletion could make or break the trip.

So not to harp on material circumstances, but it seems to have some bearing on my existence these days. It does not mean that I do not ponder the nature of truth or that I didn’t read the latest PMLA article on Polyphony (multiple voices and/or influences in a text) with great relish and enjoy the last article on daughters of famous French authors influenced by their fetish for Orientalism. But I do have to find the instructions for breaking down that pac-n-play. I’ll also be carrying chapter 4 of my book to continue revision. I fear that I’m not nearly as far along as I should be and although I probably won’t be able to use the usual time on the plane to go over it, there will probably be some driving time while Connor’s napping that I’ll have had enough of the I-5 landscape and want to look at what the hell I wrote last Fall about Armadale. Of course if I get really bored, I can write up a syllabus or two.

Or I could give myself, husband and son the kind of California dreamin’ summer vacation we hear about. I could insist on seafood dinners and sandy beaches, palm-tree-lined lanes and roadtrip stops at burger joints (diet be damned) with more kitch than ketchup. I can down Slurpees from the 7-11s and eat tootsie rolls, leave the work at home and bring only thick fantasy or 19^th century novels. Rolling down the road with my boys, dust flying, pac-n-play flapping and summer rumbling and waving its heat beneath our wheels.

I know Kerouac wrote about the joys of the open road and I’ve always sought them either solo or with Dan, but this will be our first road trip as a family. We’ll see if it’s the kind of heat we know or a different one entirely. Neitzche might have some will-to-powering things to say about it, Sarte, about how it can define one's existence, Barthes about the joy of play, Lacan about Jouissance. But are they gonna be able to make up a word for what it will be like for my son to visit his mother's homeland?

Woolfing it Down

From July 2, 2007 . . .

Something tells me that I have to stop composing my blogs on Mondays. Mondays are for the business of life: making phone calls, doing laundry, getting errands planned, finishing Friday’s work. They make for very satisfyingly busy days but are terrible for the musings of a week’s thoughts. Their work-filled day makes it tough to think or write about anything but work and getting something done to justify the weekend’s revels. And I have some revels to justify. Friday night turned into one of those old fashioned evenings one the porch that didn’t end until the crew came home from last call and 4am ticked by on the brass wall clock. Indeed I am too old for such madness, and the collateral damage was severe. Today I am getting done what I didn’t on Saturday. It’s one of those days of housecleaning and getting down to business.

They are bad days for musings.

And musing is what is needed for decent writing. That’s why Virginia Woolf said that a woman must have 500 pounds a year and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Now I love Virginia Woolf. Woolf was a writer’s writer, part of the famous Bloomsbury group of intellectuals, part of the Hogarth Press that translated and published Sigmund Freud’s work in London and author of several fine novels. My favorite piece might even be “A Room of One’s Own,” the essay in which she lays out what she thinks is necessary to produce good writing without anger. I must say, though, that Woolf may well be one of the angriest women writers in history – so angry, indeed, that she filled her pockets with rocks and walked into a lake. You can hear it in her writing, that coldly suppressed rage that goes softly logical and carries a big sticking point. It takes a lot of rage to be that destructive. But from Woolf’s warning I try not to write out of anger. I try to write out of humor, if I can.

Of course, I came out of that post-70’s mood where everyone was thinking that that a writer is just a slacker with a typewriter. But then, so many good books were written by slackers with typewriters: Tom Wolfe, Henry Miller, Ken Kesey. The boom in women’s literature in the 80’s driven by text that were uncovered, lives that were dug out of the past and considered important, and voices amplified by lovely and lively text into enough importance to center a book around. I think here of Amy Tan, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Jane Smiley. Also women had more money to buy such literature and read what the sisters were writing. It was important.

Perhaps I say this because like most women writers, I write amongst a life of laundry, children, work, getting groceries and all the mundane bits that usually interfere with “good” writing, the kind that comes out of thoughts had at 2am after long conversations with others at 2am. These are not people that have to get the dishes done and dinner on the table after work. These have the luxury of escaping the mundane for greatness. I think it’s important to remember that Virginia Woolf, although I respect her deeply, was wealthy and never had children. Some critics actually dismiss her from the Canon of women’s writing, or at least feminist writing, for that fact. For what could a childless woman of means know about most women’s experience? Well, she knew enough about it to know that most worked under material conditions that interfered with the production of art. So those who produce art do so under dire pressure of imagination to cut through the demands of work and life to get to the good stuff.

My friends Mr. C and Ms. C were over and Ms. C and I were talking of important things: where to get hair cut, how to make yogurt and where to buy shoes. These things bored Mr. C, not being part of his life or needs and he left us to go talk to some men about man things. I used to talk his way, before I had less time to get shoes and get hair cut. Now this information is important because I need to make these decisions long before I leave the house and strategize the care of my baby while I’m doing them or make sure that I accommodate his needs in my rounds of errands. I must assume that my shift of energies and interests has been determined by my change in circumstances (though I’ve always needed to know where to buy shoes – I didn’t get that shopping gene, have no practice and love shoes).

I have always argued that the things that need interest men and women need not be different, but I find sometimes that our material circumstances do claim different time investments. I’m not sure what this means, as an avid feminist currently nursing a baby. But I can tell you that it’s not a zero-sum gain or loss. I do twice as much now in half the time, but find ways to multitask that I wouldn’t have even considered before: reading e-mails while nursing, cleaning the kitchen while the baby does his floor exercises, writing while he sleeps. The life of men doesn’t always require this doubling of action. I say "always" because there are plenty of fathers out there who are primary caretakers of their children (Hi, Mr. T!).

I don’t want to, but I have to admit that the way I have chosen to parent requires a difference from the life my husband has. Had I not decided to nurse or take a few months off to raise my infant son, they would have been the same. Alas, Dan can’t make milk and I’m the only camel here. Nor could he bear this child. We could have adopted, but then we’d never know what our own child would be. It was a question to which we wanted to find the answer, hence Connor’s arrival the fairly old-fashioned way.

So am I angry? Maybe a little around the edges – I didn’t expect to be sucked in so quickly by a drooling half-smile from this fussy little baby. I didn’t expect to gratefully trade nights out for nights in. And I have been rewarded each time this little critter puts his arm around my neck. You can’t take it to the bank, you can’t wear it and the philosophical intellegencia don’t think it’s interesting.

But they always did talk a lot of nonsense anyway.