now fortified with impotent fury!risperdal

You know, Target photography studio is like american cheese slices: sometime it fulfills exactly what you need, but it’s cheap and kinda plasticky and afterwards you feel just a little bit dirty, and sometimes you really need a good aged goat cheese, or a triple creme brie. American cheese slices: okay, but every so often, you’ve got to go bigger.

So it was with the mother’s day presents this year for assorted and sundry grandmother and great grandmother (and father’s day for my grandfather). Enter, stage left, pursued not by a bear but by a tornado (no joke, the session wound up half the usual length as we did this on May Day, of the now infamous May 1 storms here), Anne Dillon Photography. To her eternal credit, after Anne saw Sean at school she emailed me and delicately broached the issue of where to do the shoot: we could meet up in a local park and get some totally satisfactory cute kid amongst the flowers shots, or how did I feel about doing something a little bit more in line with Sean’s rock star hair, unbridled personality, and collection of funky t-shirts?

(Image copyright Anne Dillon Photography, all rights reserved.)

And so if you’re in the KC area and need awesome rockstar photos of your kid, your fam, or even you, get yourself on over to Anne’s site. And if you have a brilliant way of explaining to my 90 year old grandmother why precisely we let our child play near abandoned tires and trash dumpsters, please email me post haste, as I expect my very Jewish grandmother to be on the phone to me any second now demanding to know if he’s had his tetanus booster.

(Yes Nana, he has.)

Dear C,

Right now, you really can’t read this. Right now, you really can’t focus more than 4-6 inches past the end of your nose, but that’s okay, you have ages and ages to develop that vaunted visual acuity and learn to read.

Your dad was beside himself when he called us last night, and no wonder. Before I released him to go deal with niceties such as the rest of a very long phone call list, and tending to your (poor, beleagured, you owe her big time young lady) mother, he said to me “we need to make sure she and her Cousin Sean get together soon.” But not too soon, natch, you and your parents need all manner of time to bond and settle and not deal and wear scuzzy yoga pants and eat take out and learn that a Fisher Price infant swing can in fact rip through that many D cell batteries in a week. It was thrilling and warming to hear him say that, and it summed up so neatly so much of what you should know and always carry with you.

There’s two kinds of family in this world: the one you’re born with, and the one you choose. Your mom has one of the most amazing families I’ve ever met, sprawling and snarky and rambunctious and bonded together like they were dipped in crazy glue. Your dad’s extended family is even snarkier, if such a thing were possible, and sprawls in the opposite direction: you are truly loved pole to pole, from New Zealand to Canada and back again. But your mom has siblings of blood- and choice, in the case of your uncle T and now your aunt L- and your dad has made and chosen his band of brothers and sisters. A year and three days ago we stood for them, and the night before at the rehearsal it had been all I could do not to laugh. The easy shorthand, the knowing which buttons to push and which jokes to tell, the eyerolling and hugging- your mom’s attendants so perfectly groomed and dressed so nicely. And then there were your dad’s attendants, the traveling band of freaks, cracking inappropriate pop culture references, sporting funky sweaters and loud Hawaiian type print shirts and singing the Proclaimers from time to time. And the thing is, these 9 aunts and uncles of yours, by blood or by choice, we’re all there for you, just as much if not more so than we’re there for your parents. Your auntie Matilda and uncle Zombie King, uncle BS Dinobaby and auntie Wench, we have been brothers and sisters to your dad now for a frightening percentage of our lives. We have been through breakups and marriages and fights and drinks on the balcony under the stars and bad movies and good movies and opera and wine and school and jobs and burlap lined elevators and horrible storms at the 3rd of July and moves halfway cross country. We know each other’s childhood stories perhaps almost as well as your mom’s sister and brothers. I certainly know how to make your Auntie Matilda threaten me with bodily harm, merely by mentioning a ‘caboodles’ and ‘forcible lipstick’. We might not share blood with you, but we love you as fiercely as if you were our own.

Some time shortly after your cousin Sean was born, a friend of mine asked me what I would have him know. I would have him always know how to dream, I replied, and I wish that for you though my larger wish is different. Ours is not an equal society, sad to say, though trust me your mom and your auntie B and your Aunt Matilda and me and countless other women and men are doing our level best to even the playing field. But there are things to worry about for you that I don’t need to with your cousin. That people will encourage you to take the shallow way, to embrace princesses and learned helplessness and not think to instill in you that ‘princesses are good at math’. That they’ll objectify you, bombard you with images to make you feel bad about yourself, your body, your brains, your choices. That they’ll instill in you that good girls behave and don’t make waves. That they will try to make you give up your power before you even realize you have it, that they will gnaw away at your underpinnings so that you ever have a sense of unease, of shifting, of uncertainty, so that you will never feel truly independent and confident.

And so my wish for you, little C, is different than my wish for Sean. Yes, I hope you always dream. I hope you always dream big, as big as the sky, the moon, the stars. I hope for you strength, and confidence. I hope for you beauty inside and out and the wisdom to always see it. I hope for you wit, and verve. I hope for you intelligence, and the compassion to always use it for the betterment of yourself and others. But most of all, my wish is that you always remember- so that at your darkest, lowest, scariest moment, you will know in your bones that there is a river of people around this planet who loved you long before you were born, and that love quintupled the moment your dad dialed his cell phone with the much anticipated news. That whatever you need, no matter how big or how trivial, there are people there for you. That there are women who adore you and who have gone before you, and when your head is bowed with the scorn society seems to eager to dish onto young girls, your aunts will gather round you fierce as lionesses, and you will know you are neither alone nor wrong. And, that you will never grow so old in your heart and your spirit that you feel you cannot reach out to us. Hold onto being young, little C, because that will let you do so much. It will let you dream, it will let you be kind with the innocence of a child, it will let you always be open to learning, and it will always let you be willing to find comfort and aid in the heart and mind of another.

Just 5 years ago, your dad stood with Aunt Matilda and Uncle Zombie King, along with Aunt Ada and Uncle E and Aunt R and grandparents, as Aunt R lead the ceremony to welcome Sean into my faith. And I give back to you now the words we blessed your cousin with.

May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung,
May you stay forever young.

May you grow up to be righteous,
May you grow up to be true,
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you.
May you always be courageous,
Stand upright and be strong,
May you stay forever young.
-Bob Dylan/Joan Baez

Welcome to the world, little C. We’ve got your back.

“Children, beloved childhood objects are EASY to purge,” Matilda said as I bemoaned the act of deaccessioning- and I, as a museum wonk, do not use that term lightly- part of my library. My fingers dance along dusty spines. Yesterday’s comparitively pain free purging- hated required reading from college, books which I had 3 different translations of all relatively close to one another- has given way to a far more agonizing process. A few shelves are now open, others only half or three quarters filled. They look raw and gaping, like wounds, comrades falling over to take the place of missing soldiers.

I sort and sift. The walls of words in my office have been like armaments from a life that ended a while ago: Lacan and Foucault, endless translations and godwrestling over women in Jewish life, obscure Victorian novels and classics of the Western canon. But I loved this book, I cannot get rid of it, I think time and time again, cracking it open only to feel the words rise up in mockery, the rust and grit in my brain making the wheels lock up. Was that in mishnah or gemara? Was that Derrida or Irigaray?

One box for donation, one to the basement, as I cannot bear to give up the 4 or 6 times a year I curl up with a book that was so easy, so comforting so long ago and now makes my brain ache and my eyes burn. I ever had the chops for this? I think, tossing a tractate on the laws of the rabbinic class into a box. I cannot get rid of this, Sean will want it, and off to the basement goes a book of middle Irish faerie tales and mythology, unread for a dozen years and now doomed to wait for a few more. It feels like a surrendering or a loss on the battlefield: I am not that person anymore. I am not that studious, not that well read, not that heady.

My office is nothing short of a disaster now, with cartons of books and shelves unsorted. The two largest swaths of my collection that remain are the beasts, the space hogs. Already I’ve reduced my cookbook collection by 30, between donations and condemnation to the dark recesses of the basement. But what I euphemistically call ‘visual reference’ remains untouched, the whim and whimsy of a collection started when I was a teenager, which has miraculously turned into something useful. “Books should challenge the mind,” a professor in college thundered at us, but these challenge the heart, the soul, swooping glass forms and fantasy lands, records of a country’s history and maps from the 17th century, information architecture and maps of places that never were.

The philosophy is boxed up and sent down, my stock in trade now not the inner why but the outer dream, the amazing made real, the story made flesh. And so I shed an old skin, painful though it is, and set it away to be visited from time to time, like an object hidden away in collections, instead of clung to, stunting growth.

My mom is getting me, in essence, my little pipe dream for my birthday: my office will be well and truly my own, of furniture I seek out and choose, all new to me (except the desk chair that I am keeping), and I have already scouted it out and know what I’m getting. I am springing for the paint and will take a personal day towards the end of this month to OBLITERATE THE BEIGE YAY YAY YAY.

This, uh, necessitates reducing the amount of crap in my office prodigiously.

Bring sausages! we can bbq over my burning files!

Please forgive my hubris in my last post. Clearly, we are at your mercy and whim, and I should not even consider setting foot outside, no matter how sunny and bright it is at this moment, as you could decide we should not be anticipating spring with joy, and instead will deliver hurricane force winds, hail, torrents of rain, and a tornado or 18 to our locale.

My bad, so sorry!

So I fell off the workout saddle. I fell off the cooking one, too, in the storm of work and travel and sickness and and and.

But it’s SPRING. YEEEEEHAW.

More cooking content soon.