Church Avenue Chomp

Did you have the filmstrip? We had an excellent film strip in music class at Halloween: drawings of skeletons dancing to Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns’s classic scary tune, Danse Macabre.

It was the best filmstrip ever. Every few years I try to track it down. So do other people, according to threads on the Internet. No one can seem to find it. In my quest this year, I found this, which is really fun animation created by someone else, to the same music.

I’m impressed!

We also sang a song that went:

eych, ehy, double el oh, double yu double ee en, spells Halloween. I wish I knew the genesis of that one, too. Does anyone?

Ipanema Beach

This morning I took a bike ride. I had other plans but after I ducked outside and noted the seasonal beauty combined with perfect weather, and the fact that I was alone, I ran back in to grab my bike. Lest you ignored the title and are now expecting a story about a bikeride, here is a quick synopsis:

Hills are hard; I think I need more air in my tires. It’s really nice out.

On the way back home, I dismounted to go through a little walkway that goes under the subway. You could potentially plow into someone so you aren’t allowed to ride your bike through it. In addition, these days the subway station is under construction, so the little tunnel is even smaller. Furthermore, every now and again you have to wait to go through because they are doing something blasty on the other side.

Just as I was dismounting, an MTA construction worker (no, not Steel Toe) told me that I’d have to wait for a few minutes; they were on the verge of doing the blasty thing.

“Sounds good,” I yelled.

Then a period of time ensued where the guy guarding the tunnel and I were going to be together for the next few minutes. We weren’t too close together, so I didn’t worry about it. He, however, seemed to think it was an awkward silence, judging by the fact that he decided to fill it: he started whistling a familiar tune in a rudimentary way, and banging along on the blue-painted plywood that defines subway construction projects.

Then he paused and yawned loudly enough that everyone in the borough could hear him. “I’m tired,” he announced, for my benefit.

I countered with, “Just keep whistling and you’ll probably stay awake.”

The blasty thing was still happening.

“Hey,” the MTA guy asked. “Do you happen to know that song I was singing?”

And I most certainly did, so I nodded, and because I was in such a good mood, and because there was no one else around, I sang for him:

He was pretty stoked.

“Hey, you know it, you know it! Do you know what’s it’s called?”

“The Girl from Ipanema.”

“The Girl from Ipakeepa?”

“Ipanema.”

“Ipameeno?

“Ipanema.”

Do you have a pen, he wanted to know. He’d heard the song in a movie. “I loved it so much,” this guy in a hard hat and with goggles atop his head explained, “and sometimes, you just want to have a nice glass of wine and listen to great music, you know?”

Oh yes, I know.

I didn’t have a pen, but I told him I was going to get ready for work and would be back in half an hour. I could write it down and bring it to him on my way into the train.

“Thanks sweetheart! Looks like you can pass now.”

The blasty thing had finished.

When I came back, I brought a slip of paper. However, I didn’t see him. There had been a whole lot of guys in construction hats and glowing vests swarming around earlier, but it seemed that most of them were at lunch. I saw a few, but didn’t recognize him. Since I was nosing around a construction project at a subway station, attempting to look nonchalant, the MTA station attendant stuck in the booth turned on the cackling microphone and asked me what I was looking for. You know, “If you see something say something” style.

I couldn’t bring myself to say “I’m looking for a construction worker I wrote down the name of a samba jazz classic for.” But I caught the eye of one of the other guys and asked him to pass along the slip of paper to his coworker who wanted the name of a song. Then I quickly tried to retract that, because I realized that I couldn’t describe the guy very well bad because they were all just looking at me, with slight smiles. But the ringleader (Steel Toe?) was definitely delighted for an opportunity to be some sort of romantic enabler — a real Cyrano. You could tell that’s what he was thinking. “Your note is for a laborer? I will get this note to the laborer.” He was adamant.

I hope that this doesn’t make walking by the site uncomfortable but so far, this so far is a great group of construction workers. Chivalrous, cultured, et cetera.

If the job site just had one of those fun electric rats, everything would be perfect!

Typical NYC Construction Site

Caveat emptor: This is largely unedited, even for flow of ideas, but it was on my mind. You may find it dry as a bone to read. Also, too long. And it doesn’t have any recipes, photos, or jokes. But hey, at least it’s free!

I don’t know whether I missed something in therapy, but recently I’ve seen a spate of references — well, two references, but two well-placed references can seem a spate — to a concept that could potentially be very helpful to me. Everyone else is probably already doing this and leading happy and fully realized lives, but in case they are not, here it is:

Whatever you are doing, just do it.

One reference was by in advice column I like to read: Cary Tennis on Salon. It was thoughtful advice to someone leaving their spouse and wondering if they were making a terrible decision. The columnist basically said “Well: you’ve decided, things are in play, and this is what you are doing, so relax into it, and do it fully.”

How can I apply this to my own life? Why does it resonate?

Another was a conversation with a friend who is a mother of two, and like many mothers, she has multiple ambitions tugging at her heart and time. And I think that there can be a frustration when you are used to being at work, or working on your own projects and accomplishing things, and then suddenly your job is to hang out with someone who will not, under any circumstances, put on their shoe when you want them to, and the other stuff gets shelved. Even if being a mom is a thing that you have wanted to do more than anything else, it is a huge adjustment to see the time and space for these other things go away, or be vastly diminished.

My friend who was talking about it has more parenting experience with this than I do but recently mentioned that maybe, for the next few years, that is just what she should do, and not expect to be able to do any of the other stuff. By changing her expectations, stop being frustrated about not working on a book or a business or another project, but just letting herself be a full-time mom and do what she is going to have to do anyhow, and doing it without struggle.

“Huh,” I thought. “Without struggle.”

I must admit that this seemed like sort of an alien concept, either because I can’t imagine thinking myself (resigning myself?) past a struggle, or because I just don’t know if it would work.

It seemed like even more of a commitment than just Mindfulness, which I have a hard enough time with.

When I think of Mindfulness, the example I think of is cereal. Mindfulness is: if you are eating a bowl of cereal, you shouldn’t also be drafting the letter to Mitt Romney that you have to write for work and trying to wash out the bowl of cereal almost before you are done so you don’t have to do it later while also going to the bathroom and pricing tickets to Honduras. Or wait, should you go to Belize again? Mindfulness is just eating the cereal, until you are done. It is deciding you want cereal, pouring it, sitting down to eat it, eating it all the while being aware of what you are doing, and then finishing it, without even starting to watch Mad Men or checking your email. Mindfulness is not photographing the light playing off of the cereal using some new filter on your iPhone in order to post it on Facebook.

Hard, right? And that’s just for cereal. The cereal is daily practice, so that you learn where those muscles are. Where it really comes into play is when you are supposed to apply it in an actually challenging situation.

Mindfulness gets even harder when you are thinking about being angry, and instead of resorting to whatever you do when you are angry, acknowledging how you feel, HONORING how you feel, and then being mindful of the way that you react. All of this includes not smashing things or yelling.

“Act, don’t react,” another friend likes to say. What a nice catch phrase! But just try it because it is freaking impossible! But you’ve gotten your mindfulness muscles strong through the cereal and then you can flex them to paying attention to how you feel but also how you might normally react and how you might prefer it if you could react differently, and then actually put that into play. It’s awareness. I guess that awareness is just a synonym for mindfulness, and that the Mindfulness with a capital M people definitely went to the thesaurus on that one.

Yoga should (and does, I would argue) assist with these seemingly simple goals. It’s funny how just sitting still and eating a bowl of cereal can be a harder posture to hold than Warrior Two pose. You are doing this, so just do it. Until you have tried it, Warrior Two looks easy, yet can be difficult to manage; apparently so can the seemingly simple act keeping cereal eating simple. Maybe I should try sitting at the table just bringing my mind back from Don Draper and Honduras again and again, to, “corn flakes. corn flakes.” Because goodness knows that I have spent enough time in Warrior Two to think “wow, my right thigh is burning, and having my arms at heart level makes my heart thump, and my back tired.” However, I have paid someone to tell me to do it, and to watch me to do it, and we both know that I will be a little bit ashamed if I stop doing it just because it’s a little bit uncomfortable.

But I have found just being in different positions and having those thoughts so helpful when I am in a dentist chair, and someone wants me to have my mouth open forever with a drill in it. And my jaw hurts and it is scary-smelling smoke emanating from that drill against my tooth, but I can use the same little voice to say “Wow, for the time being I am at the dentist trying not to swallow blood and bone shards, plus my mouth hurts, but you know, it is no harder to passively sit here than it is to actively do chair pose, and I know that these ‘sensations’ will end.”

When I have to get dressed for work, or pack for business trips, or plan dinner, I can get stressed to a degree that is not commensurate — even at all — with the task. I just think and worry and go through lots of option, all for nothing. It is a total waste of time and energy. And at those times I often find myself thinking, “What is important is that I make a decision. It is does not matter a whit what the decision is, but a decision, any decision, needs to be made, and stuck to.”

And once I have made the decision, even if I am doomed to a few days in a less-than-perfect outfits, or serving my family a boring, carrot-intensive meal, I can stop using the freneticism of the task to rev the engine and having my wheels spin and make me anxious. And I am just doing what I am doing.

So, that is the thought for the day. Even the thought for the day meandered a whole lot, from my original concept, to my relationship to mindfulness and what that might actually mean.

Of course, leaving the action of the moment and deciding what you are going to use in the moment (ie, looking at the cereal in the bowl and thinking, “I want to write a post about the cereal in the bowl” is the sort of mental note-taking that is part and parcel of not focusing on the task at hand.  Hmm. I just wonder where “mental notes” fit into mindfulness. Or maybe the mindfulness people don’t try to blog and just eat gruel and only wear stretchy clothes. That doesn’t sound that great, either.

Maybe I need a combo? I am just going to do a lot of things, I think, but maybe with greater awareness and focus. Usually I am eating the cereal alone. Lately, I even find it hard to eat cereal with someone else, someone small who also loves cereal, without doing other things. I’d like to be able to focus. And I’d like him to be able to focus. That would be nice. So nice.

look! these are not my fingernails!

Frankly I was cranky the first time that it showed up in the freezer, but I am here to report that Caramel Cone by Haagen-Dazs is the best possible flavor of ice cream, if not the best possible flavor of anything.

I never loved ice cream until I was pregnant. Without a fetus inside me, I prefer a dessert with crumbs in it. Crumbs and lemon and salt and cream.

(Maybe tomorrow I will get four pets and name them: Crumbs, Salt, Lemon, Cream.

Crumbs would be a turtle.

Salt would be a snake.

Lemon would be a bunny.

Cream would be a cat.

Except, pet-flavored dessert is not the best kind, and that is something we can all agree on.)

As for real-world ice cream, I love the idea of the Ben and Jerry’s brand, because of green and Vermont and politics and things that are character driven. And perhaps more importantly, those are ice creams designed for maximalists, of which I am one. Pretzels stuffed crammed with peanut butter, bits of chocolate shaped like little fish ready to melt in your mouth, insouciant sediments frozen midway through some marvelous geology of butterfat wonder: I am pleased by this.  But I’m not the person in our house who cares too much about ice cream, and as anyone who has tried being married, or at least being married to me, can attest, marriage is about compromises. Though actually, our familial switch to the Haagen-Dazs brand may have as much to do with the fact that in New York, that’s what they sell in all of the delis, and ice cream is more of an impulse buy than most of the rest of the groceries.

The first time my husband made dinner for me, it was August and we grilled tuna on his fire escape and dressed it with herbs from his windowsill herb garden. Well, he did those things, and I sat and drank gin and tonics. Later that night, we walked out to get some ice cream. This was his idea. I hadn’t spent much time in his neighborhood before, certainly not after dark, and he seemed either wholly unaware or wholly unconcerned that we were about to be killed at any moment. We walked through a tunnel over to a deli in a neighborhood where it was late enough that they were exterminating their astroturfed fruit shelves. We slid money through a slot in some bullet proof glass because it was too late for the actual deli to be open.

That night, we got chocolate. We rarely get just plain chocolate these days, because we have a child and we would rather die than be more tired than we are, and chocolate keeps us up, like crazy geriatrics. But back then, I was getting a glimpse into his intense desire for ice cream, and for chocolate. Later I would experience it myself, when I was carrying his child, who apparently inherited that gene. Now that the child is out and about, I have a far more normal relationship to chocolate ice cream, but I’ve glimpsed the darkness of addiction.

I also refuse to get plain vanilla. Even though many people with excellent taste buds love vanilla ice cream and delight in say things like “vanilla ice cream is a barometer: it’s  like a margherita pizza; you get that one, and you judge by that,”and I love vanilla in my food, I feel sad when I am not experiencing a fuller tableau when I am splurging. I want some contrasts. Ice cream should be exciting, and vanilla might be refined, but it’s hard to get the joy of reveling in excess when staring into a bowl of white. I want things floating, changes of texture, salt, maybe something bitter. (For the record, I also like toppings on my pizza.)

I used to love Chocolate Peanut Butter by Haagen-Dasz the most, but I believe that in recent years, our collective tastes have morphed and that the current zeitgeist for salt in our sweet drives flavors like Dulce de Leche and Caramel Cone.

So now, I am onto Caramel Cone, which has salt and crunch and crumbs and chewiness and chocolate. Try it, even if it doesn’t sound that good. Try it. Try it!

“Clean crash” is a phrase to describe to what happens after the sugar rush from a bowl of ice cream ends. Matthew theorizes that it’s a “clean crash,” which can actually help you to sleep. We tell ourselves what we must, don’t we.

In the fall, there are lots of things to pick and pet and taste and carve, right? Last weekend had an air of harvest and it became clear that we’d better go out and do something pumpkin oriented STAT. Everyone else in the neighborhood had been feeling that way, too, so there were lots of recommendations for things to do on our neighborhood listserv, and I knew that we could go to Queens County Farm and do some country things without leaving the city.

Like Brooklyn, Queens is vast and multidimensional. I’ve never lived there, though, so I find it confusing. Queens County Farm is in “Floral Park,” which is one of the parts of Queens that is snuggled up to Long Island, and is very residential and green. As we sought a parking spot, it began to seems like all 8 million of us were jonesing for pumpkins at exactly the same moment.

Then I started to think about how Queens County Farm could not possibly grow so many pumpkins at this historical place which has nods to farming, but isn’t, after all, a giant industrial agriculture farm. I began to reason in the small yet active nihilistic part of my brain, that to serve the pumpkin needs of every New Yorker, they must truck them in. And what if instead of trucking them in from Long Island, they trucked them in from say, China? I needed to at least pretend that my pumpkin-to-be was local. Finally we just decided to go and see some animals first, since carrying a pumpkin around all day is not a good plan, anyhow. It seemed like the best thing to do that was to go to the farm next door — Green Meadows Farm — which was having tours.

We showed up and talked with a woman who worked there. She was nice and informative and explained the tour that was available, but she seemed a little concerned. We soon connected her furrowed brow with her belief that we’d come to do a child-focused tour without a child. She just couldn’t see that our child was actually in a pack on his father’s back, quietly waiting to be shown splendid animals and hay. She was relieved when we pointed him out, and she sold us some tickets.

With Claire, our aged and yet cheerful group leader, our motley group of children and parents of all different shapes and sizes and ethnicities strode off in the direction of a cow. The cow was chained in place, but it was healthy-looking and furry and we were allowed to milk it.

Then we looked at baby cows, which are very cute and have fuzzy horns. Like young human offspring, they were mostly concerned about whether we had anything to hand them to eat. We did not, but in a situation like that, in a desperate bid to garner attention from the hungry animal, Henry will start grabbing things from the ground — usually grass — and attempt to use it as an enticement. When he did this to fields of sheep eating grass in England, I kept trying to speak for him, to entice the sheep over to where he was. “Look! This strand of grass is pre-picked! You may to walk over here to get it, as opposed to standing where you are to eat, but you don’t have to chew it out of the ground!” The baby cows didn’t fall for it, either.

Then we saw pot-bellied pigs, and then real giant pigs along with their babies. Cornering animals to pet them is a very popular activity in our house, and the tour was going well because most of the animals were either handed to us or trapped in a small chamber where we could touch them.

There was a pony ride. It was Henry’s first pony ride, and therefore to be relished. But to relish something, you need to realize that it is going to happen, and then you need time and space for it to happen, and then you need to be able to happily reflect, and you probably need to do it again. When it was Henry’s time to get onto the pony, he had barely even registered that he was on a pony before it was off and walking around the ring. The ring has a pretty small circumference, and as we arrived near to where we started, Henry was removed from the pony. I think we can all agree that going on a pony for 30 seconds and then being removed from it with no chance of going on another pony — which was our situation, since we were on a tour with different stations — is preferable to not going on a pony that you have seen — but it is more frustrating than never being presented with one in the first place. I felt like there was no way that he could have processed that experience.

Later, my mother would assure me that it is not because I am raising my child in New York that he only got one “swoop’ round the circle. “Oh, they’re terrible, those pony ride people! They only ever give you one swoop. Everyone should get at least two swoops, possibly three or four.”

One highlight of the day was the hayride. The cars we rode in were pulled by a tractor, which was like a very brightly colored truck. Henry rode with his mouth open the entire time. Another highlight was a pen full of snow white chickens with blue faces.

Claire, our farm docent, had taken a liking to us, perhaps because we didn’t try to cheat and get on the ponies twice. (I took note of other people failing to succeed in this before I decided not to try.) She had asked me where I am from, thinking I was from Ireland, and she had let Matthew help her out in picking up baby ducklings so that small children could pet them. (Not all adults are trustworthy enough to pick up the ducklings.)

She showed us how to pick up the fluffy chickens very delicately, around the wings. She hugged one around Henry’s neck. I hugged one around my own neck, and if you can stop your brain from wondering when you will wash your neck, the experience is sublime.

When we were done, we could each pick a pumpkin. Tell a small child to pick a pumpkin, and it will rush with great purpose to the edge of the pile, and pick the first mangy half-green misshapen one it comes to. It’s so charming, the ones which they pick. We brought home two. I hope we get around to carving them. Meanwhile, I leave you with this photo.

Chicken Scarf