Pertinent to my Interests

Part of my purpose in writing this blog is to leave something of myself behind for my kids to read when I’m gone. As such, there are going to be posts where I just go off reminiscing of the olden days.

Hold on to your butts.

When I was in first or second grade my grandparents hauled their old piano out of their house and delivered it to our basement. This piano was old enough to have ivory keys, but also old enough to be missing several pieces of the ivory keys. I’m not sure if it was ever tuned properly, and it was a beast, but this was my first piano.

My mom was my first piano teacher. We had a beginner book, we had a piano, but we did not have the right vibe. My mom is not a great teacher and I think we both quickly realized this was going to work much better if a professional teacher was acquired.

My next piano teacher was a real piano teacher, but she moved away after my first year of lessons. She was unremarkable, and I only remember that her son was in my class at school. I can’t even remember her name.

And then we get to my real piano teacher, that Ozymandias of my musical memory, Kathryn.

Kathryn was a talented musician who merely tolerated her young students and always used a purple pen to mark up the music. Her studio was in the family room of her house, and she had somehow managed to squeeze in two(!) baby grand pianos, several keyboards, and an entire wall of sheet music.

I still remember the dread of walking into that room on weeks when I had not practiced enough. My sister and I had lessons back-to-back and had a standing agreement that whoever had not practiced enough would get to go second, thus gaining an extra thirty minutes to work with the unpracticed material at the keyboard.

Sometimes neither of us had practiced enough, and those were bad weeks. We would argue about who would be first to disappoint Kathryn. Sometimes I lost the argument and then I would be the one to carefully take my seat on the piano bench, heart pounding. I would start in on the first measure thinking it was going to turn out okay and she wouldn’t notice, and then by the third measure I would have already missed two of the B flats and the rhythm would have fallen apart and Kathryn would be livid.

“Did you practice at all this week?” she would ask, even though she already knew the answer. She would huff for the rest of the lesson, as if I had personally offended both her and Sergei Rachmaninoff with my lack of practicing. My sister and I both got kicked out of lessons early at least once for not practicing enough.

Both of my siblings took piano lessons from Kathryn for years, and for a while my mother did too. This necessarily led to the Era of Two Pianos in our house. My mom found an awesome old upright in the classified ads and that piano still sits in the upstairs living room of her house. It’s not an attractive piano but it sounds amazing despite being tuned exactly twice in the thirty years she has had it. Four people taking piano lessons plus two pianos resulted in a constant parade of music and missed accidentals in our house for a while.

This was before the age of Musicnotes.com, so when choosing what songs to play we were dependent on both Kathryn’s library of sheet music and her limited interest in anything composed after 1965. At some point of mastery there was a fork in the road of sheet music and we had two choices for the coming years of piano: “classical” or “modern.” Modern was just a code word for jazz, it seemed, so I picked “classical” and that is how I developed a lifelong appreciation for Bach and a lifelong distaste for Bartok.

In my last year of middle school, Kathryn took a sabbatical. My mom managed to find yet another temporary piano teacher whose name I do not remember. This teacher worked in a little room attached to the local record store. She had a computer with cool composition programs on it. She gave us more freedom to pick out our own music, resulting in some interesting choices that year.

“Well, let’s hear what you’ve been playing,” Kathryn said that next September when we were back in her family room studio with the twin baby grands. I proudly placed my fingers on the keys and launched into a gorgeous arrangement of My Heart Will Go On from the hit movie Titanic. Kathryn just sighed heavily and closed her eyes as if praying for strength.

Kathryn insisted on memorization of your performance piece for the annual spring recital. There was nothing more shameful than walking up to the big grand piano at the front of the church in your nice clothes and bringing your music with you. I think I only failed to memorize twice in the eight years I played in her recitals. Memorization or not, I was always a nervous wreck about recitals, especially as I improved and my named dropped closer and closer to the end of the program every year. My heart would pound harder with every song leading to mine.

Kathryn was an amazing pianist herself, and really should have been a performer rather than a teacher but I suppose there aren’t many opportunities for profitable performance in my small hometown. I remember one time I watched her perform a piece that I knew pretty well; I was astonished to hear several mistakes! I mentioned this to my mom.

“Yes, but she just kept playing, right?” my mom asked. I agreed that Kathryn had kept playing as if nothing had happened. “That’s the trick,” my mom said knowingly.

I performed in a senior recital with two of my closest friends and we were great. I played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C# Minor, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, and Telemann’s Fantasia in D Minor, which is the only one of the three I failed to memorize. At the time I thought the Rachmaninoff was the height of my ability, but I’ve since decided that an emotionally tuned Clair de Lune requires a lot more skill than the pounding wide chords of the Rachmaninoff. I still play the Debussy from time to time when I want to challenge myself and feel melancholy at the same time.

I think about Kathryn a lot now because my kids are currently taking piano lessons and their teacher is basically the opposite of her. Their teacher seems to love teaching kids despite the many challenges. She finds fun songs for them to play, and will spend hours searching out a just-right arrangement of whatever weird video game song they have requested. My youngest is interested in composition, and she is happy to shift the piano primer book into the background and instead work with him on chord theory. Recitals are built to be fun, not stressful. Memorization is encouraged but very optional.

I love this gentle approach for my kids, and they have a great rapport with their teacher. But I don’t feel like I missed out in any way. I loved my teacher and I think she loved me despite my flawed practice record. I still own a bunch of sheet music marked up in her purple pen. And thanks to that purple pen I still never miss the high E flat in the eighteenth measure of Clair de Lune.

It’s May and change is in the air. The children are extra squirrely. I’ve had “teacher gifts” on the bottom of my to do list for weeks now. The calendar is full of recitals and graduations.

It’s almost the end of the school year, and as the unemployed parent I both eagerly anticipate and dread the end of the school year.

I used to be really good at having my kids home with me all the time. Even when they were toddlers and babies and they were always inventing new ways to hurt themselves and each other, I rocked the stay-at-home parenthood. We had some built-in routines but also flexibility. I had a running list in my head of potential outings and playdates. I knew what time all the nature centers opened, and which indoor play areas were most likely to keep my kids immersed for hours. I rotated toys like it was my job (I mean I guess it was my job).

I can’t tell if I’m just out of practice or still burned out from those early years of parenthood. I was good at it, but it was hard. Really hard.

Good Things About the Upcoming Summer Break:
1. No more prying my youngest out of bed with a crowbar at 6 AM.
2. No more homework! Even better: no more emotions about homework!
3. Flexible schedule for cabin time, hiking, going to the pool, etc.
4. Three months of not worrying about school shootings!

Bad Things About the Upcoming Summer Break:
1. I am in charge of my children’s entertainment and stimulation 100% of the time.

Now please know that I am a big proponent of boredom in childhood. Boredom is the seed of creativity! Boredom is what gives us space to explore our thoughts. Boredom is amazing!

But how much boredom is too much boredom? And at what point does healthy boredom become social isolation and a harmful lack of parental interest?

This was something I struggled with back when they were little and I was a stay-at-home mom. Yes, I did want them to experience boredom and not be dependent on me for stimulation, but if I had been working they would have been in daycare and constantly entertained by their classmates and the fun art project the teacher was leading. There were things they missed out on by not going to daycare, and I felt the pressure to make up for that by planning regular playdates and constant playground trips.

I think it worked out okay, and my kids are pretty good at self-entertaining, but not all day every day. Even animals in the zoo need stimulation, and my little nine- and eleven-year-old animals do need entertainment.

But maybe I’m overcomplicating things by assuming they need outings and playdates.

My favorite childhood summers were the summers of 1995, 1996, and 1997. My mom was sick of dealing with the bullshit of the high school students she used to hire as nannies every summer. My sister and I were not old enough to legally work yet, but we were old enough to stay home alone during the day. In the morning my mom would write our chores on the whiteboard in the kitchen, drop my little brother off at his cheap summer daycare, and my sister and I would get almost eight hours daily of the house to ourselves.

Those were fantastic summers. We listened to Jewel’s Pieces of You album over and over again while we did cartwheels in the living room and ate dry cocoa mix. We watched The Sound of Music every day one summer, and My Best Friend’s Wedding every day the next summer. I played with my gerbils in the sandbox. This was the summer that the kindly Jehovah’s Witnesses gave us a pamphlet about their religion and by the time my mom got home from work my sister and I had doctored it up into “The Monkey Bible.” We never left the house during the day. We loved it.

Maybe this summer I should bring back the Summer of 1995 for my own kids. Dry cocoa mix will be the only snack option. We’ll buy some gerbils and download the Pieces of You album. I’ll tell the kids they can have as much screen time as they want but the only screen time options are The Sound of Music and My Best Friend’s Wedding. I will teach them how to do cartwheels.

And if we’re lucky the Jehovah’s Witnesses will show up at least once.

But the reality is that I am not a single working mother. I am home all day, I don’t have a job. My kids missed out on daycare in their early years and now it feels like they’re missing out on the glory of the independent summer unencumbered by the presence of a responsible adult. I’m going to be here every day yelling at them about clothes left on the floor and doling out little doses of screen time. I’m going to make them eat apples for snack and go on long, annoying hikes.

Moms truly are the worst.

I gotta get a job.

We’ve been up at our cabin the last two weekends working to get ready for the summer. We planted a bunch of new trees this year. We got out the kayaks, launched the jet ski, mowed the lawn, and did some beaver-proofing on our favorite trees. I removed four wheelbarrow loads of muck and weeds from the lake.

There are many downsides to owning a cabin, the obvious one being that we have an entire second home and property to maintain along with our primary house. And we’re dealing with new things that ten years of owning a home in a city didn’t prepare us for: well pumps and septic systems and docks and lake weed. When we’re at the cabin I worry about the house, and when we’re home I worry about the cabin.

One of the most unexpected benefits of the cabin is the change of scenery and change of pace.

Maybe this isn’t a surprise to the rest of you, but it was to me. I’m a homebody. I like not leaving my house and I like not leaving my neighborhood and I like not leaving my city. There’s a reason my family hasn’t done a ton of traveling, and that’s because I’m not a good traveler and I dislike planning trips. Why would we leave our house?! All of my favorite stuff and my favorite cheese and my cats and my books are at my house!

The cabin, it turns out, is the best of both worlds. It’s like traveling without the travel. I already have a toothbrush at the cabin, and my favorite Brandi Carlile sweatshirt and I know where we keep the silverware.

So packing is easy. Getting there is easy.

Being there is easy and comfortable in a way I didn’t think it would be.

I sit on the porch in the morning drinking my coffee and waiting for a visit from our neighborhood beaver. We try to keep device use to a minimum at the cabin, which means we play more board games and card games. When we sit around the fire in the evenings we look at each other instead of at our phone screens. The kids get one pop per day at the cabin as a special treat. If we stay up late enough we can see the Milky Way.

Honestly, sometimes it’s a little too much family time. And there are always chores and projects to be done. The bathroom at the cabin has to be cleaned too, you know. One winter the boiler failed spectacularly causing major damage.

So the cabin is not a vacation, and it can be stressful, but somehow it still feels refreshing to have gone to the cabin. It’s a very small departure from our every day, even with the small stresses that come with traveling on the weekends.

A little change is good.

I was embarrassingly old when I found out that you could request alterations to your meal at any restaurant.

Like… really embarrassingly old. I’m talking post-college.

Yeah.

But what am I supposed to think if Burger King is going to use the tag line “Have it your way!” in their advertising? If it’s special that you can “have it your way” at Burger King, doesn’t that imply that you can’t have it your way at other restaurants?

One of the reasons I didn’t realize this until late in life is that I come from a family that never asks for alterations. Really! Every single one of us will go around the table and just order what’s on the menu. My husband’s family–on the other hand–always has a question to ask or an alteration to request. Are there mushrooms in the soup? Serve the sauce on the side, please. No pickles. Extra mayo. The difference in our family cultures in this regard is comical to me.

I was late to the game realizing I could make changes to my food orders, but I was also late to the game realizing I could even state my opinions about food.

It was 1995. My mom’s boyfriend and his son (or as I like to refer to him, my temporary stepbrother) were at our house for dinner. There was sourdough bread on my temporary stepbrother’s plate and he said “Oh, I don’t really like sourdough.” And then he didn’t eat it.

My mind was blown. It had not occurred to me until that moment that a person could state their negative feelings about food at the table and then refuse to eat that food.

I don’t know why, but I tended to eat whatever I was served. Was it my mom’s opposition to keeping good snacks around? Or was I just a particularly hungry child? I don’t know, but I remember sighing and finishing my bowl of split pea soup even though I would rather eat grass from the yard. I hollowed out a lot of stuffed peppers in my day, leaving a trail of sad bell pepper skins behind me. I still think I don’t like rice.

It pains me as an adult to relate these childhood complaints because having someone else cook for me seems like such a wonderful luxury now!

Anyway, like I said, I was a hungry child, so I don’t think I actually stopped eating anything after I had this realization. And I still don’t alter my food orders at restaurants even though I know I can.

“As it comes?” my husband will ask for clarification if he’s putting in an online order.

“Of course, as it comes!” I always say.

But someone still needs to explain to me how “have it your way” makes sense for Burger King’s branding if you can actually have it your way anywhere!

1. Fall
   Most of fall is fleece weather! Summer is over, and we are back to a routine with the kids in school. The sun is going down at a civilized time. After months of everything being !!bright and happy!! all the time!! we are finally reminded that everything ends and that everyone we love will someday be as dead as the annuals I forced myself to plant in May when I was pretending to like gardening. The trees are gorgeous colors one day and then wistful bare branches the next. We have Halloween, my favorite holiday! We have Thanksgiving which is just a lazy four-day weekend and does not require any gift purchasing! You cannot have light without darkness, and this entire season of barreling toward the darkness is poignant and beautiful to me.
2. Winter
   You have to be hardy to survive winter here. I like it when nature is trying to kill me every time I go outside. I love the dark afternoons. I get out candles and I put up fairy lights in the house and everything glows. You have to make your own light and your own heat in the winter, and this appeals to me. We pile blankets on the couches for both humans and cats, and there is no pressure to go outside after 4 PM. This is puzzle season for me. I play the piano and read a lot in the winter and never fret about the house getting too hot if I turn on the oven. Fresh snow makes the outside world bright and quiet and perfect. There is no yardwork, only shoveling. And sledding. And building snowmen and snow forts.
3. Summer
   My feelings about summer have changed a lot ever since we bought our cabin. Now that I have regular lake access, I find summer much more tolerable. Summers when we lived in New York City were absolutely awful; walking down the stairs into the subway stations was like descending into hell. There was nowhere to swim. I was working full-time back then so still had to put on dress pants and a blouse every day and then sweat my ass off waiting for the N train. I cannot handle humidity despite more than a decade of living in humid places. But summer means swimming and swimming is my favorite thing. Summer means campfires and open windows in the morning. Summer means flexible schedules and my kids at home. And at some point every summer we get fresh peaches, so I will tolerate summer.
4. Spring
   Muddy. Grey. Muddy. Wet. Muddy. I do not like spring at all. The snow starts to melt and everything looks like shit. The snow finishes melting and everything looks like shit. Plants and flowers start to struggle back to life and everything still looks like shit for a couple weeks. Then you have to clean up your yard and try to keep some plants alive. If you’re a woman you have to pretend you enjoy gardening and smile and say thank you when someone gets you a potted plant for Mother’s Day. We go to the cabin and the water looks so inviting but it’s only 56 degrees and that is too cold even for someone like me who is built like a harp seal. We have to set our clocks forward and it takes almost two full weeks for my body to adjust. I’m not sweating now but I will be soon. And did I mention it’s muddy? Spring is the worst.

Last Thursday my youngest kid woke up and croaked out the words that I dread hearing from him because he’s always correct in his diagnosis: “I think I have strep.” Off we went to his favorite urgent care location and favorite pharmacy (you would have a favorite urgent care and pharmacy too if you got strep as often as he does).

The next day was Friday, and luckily the amoxicillin had kicked in and he was well enough to go to school. I happened to have my annual physical that day, something I had been dreading for many reasons but ended up going well.

On Monday morning I woke up with a rash on my arms and legs, and swollen, painful joints all over my body. I was alarmed, especially since I had just had a mysterious high fever and no other symptoms about a week before this. I’m not the kind of person who runs off to urgent care at the first sign of illness, but this was weird enough I felt an urgent care visit was warranted and that is how I ended up spending three hours at urgent care on Monday morning and then walking away without any real diagnosis.

My youngest kid had an appointment with the ear, nose & throat surgeon on Monday as well, after school. That doctor was running behind, and we ended up spending more than two hours at the specialty clinic.

And I have to go back today to follow up with my primary care doctor about my ongoing joint pain and rash!

This is why old people are tired all the time. It is exhausting to spend so much time at the doctor’s office. Waiting for the nurse, waiting for the doctor, waiting for the lab. I have great sympathy for those with chronic conditions who have to spend so much time managing their healthcare.

Anyway, having what basically amounts to arthritis in most of my joints this week has been an interesting experiment in getting old. Who knew that buttons could pose such a challenge? Squeezing out a washcloth is both difficult and painful.

Even more disturbing, my husband asked if I wanted him to come along to the appointment today. How sick does he think I am?! I have definitely not reached the “needs a companion at every appointment” stage yet, and don’t intend to for a long time, even if this is the beginning of something chronic (I don’t think it is).

On the positive side: every single medical assistant, patient registration specialist, nurse, doctor, surgeon, and phlebotomist that we have interacted with in the past week has been stellar.

When I was little, I accidentally dropped a small, plastic dinosaur out the back window of my dad’s 1987 Ford Ranger.

I was five years old and had been pretending that the dinosaur was running quickly through the woods, holding him up against the open pop-out window as we sped through the Cascade Mountains. My sister and I had a lot of plastic dinosaurs back then, most of them too big to fall through the crack, but this guy was a tiny ankylosaurus made of soft glow-in-the dark plastic. My fingers twitched the wrong way and suddenly he was gone.

I was frozen. Should I alert my parents and ask them to turn around and search for him? Would they agree to that? Would we even be able to find him on the side of the highway in the heart of the Cascade Mountains? Would they be mad? Would my sister be mad when she found out?

I didn’t say anything, but I still think about this incident regularly. It was the first time I remember realizing that disaster can happen in an instant. One moment he was safe in my hand and the next moment he was gone forever.

Maybe it’s silly to assign such weight to that moment. “Accidentally dropped a beloved plastic dinosaur out the window of a car” is not on the childhood trauma questionnaire. But I was five; I loved my plastic dinosaurs and I had not yet experienced the finality of death, which is the real before-and-after moment in a person’s life.

Is that little plastic ankylosaurus still out there somewhere, sun-bleached and brittle from all those years on the side of the road? Is he destroyed or smushed? Did a stranger find him while cleaning the highway, and did this stranger pause and wonder how this little guy ended up out in the middle of nowhere before she thrust him into the trash bag?

I wish objects had the power to tell their stories.

And if my sister is reading this: I’m sorry I lost one of our plastic dinosaur friends 35 years ago!

I started working retail in 2001, back when I was still in high school. I was at this little shop in my small hometown that sold patio furniture and pool chemicals and swimming toys and all sorts of junk that nobody needs.

There was no computer when I started. We were still using those little carbon copy slips to write out purchases. We calculated the tax with a calculator! Even more mind-boggling: we didn’t have a credit card machine. We had to set the credit card in this crazy little contraption and slide a mechanism over it to make an imprint and then have the customer sign the imprinted slip. It was bonkers.

We did get a computer system the next summer, and a real credit card machine that used the telephone line to dial out. Things went much faster once we could scan items, and I had a lot of fun entering inventory into the database and printing out new stickers whenever we got another box of junk.

That was a great job. I had a great boss who was good at managing the business and respected all the employees. I had an alcoholic coworker who showed up on time every morning, was super sarcastic and funny, and would take regular smoke breaks and report back to me on whatever obnoxious tourist bullshit was happening on the sidewalk. I had another coworker who taught me how to swear effectively in Spanish, and another who introduced me to modern country music.

One time I was standing at the cash register and a little girl approached the counter with tears in her eyes and a broken item in her hands. She explained, with her parents standing silently behind her, that she had been messing around and had accidentally broken the glass lawn ornament. Ashamed, she said she would like to pay for the broken item. I told took the two glass pieces from her and told her she was very brave for coming forward and admitting her mistake; because she had been so brave and honest we would not be charging her for the item.

See, when you work in a small business in a small town you can make decisions like this. (But I have no doubt my boss would have made the same call.)

Another time I was working with my younger, smaller, less-white coworker, when a man came in with his two daughters. The girls picked out a squirt gun, but when my coworker rang it up and the total was about $3 more than what was listed on the sticker. Clearly an inventory error and as I made my way to the front counter to correct it the man started berating my coworker.

I can’t remember exactly what he said, just that he called her stupid several times and there were some bad words thrown in there too.

I had been intending to override the cash register and honor the lower price on the sticker (obviously), but the man’s behavior had caused adrenaline to flood my system and by the time I got there I had decided on a different response.

“Hi, I’m the manager on duty,” I said. “You need to leave the store.”

This only pissed him off more and he started directing his vitriol at me, screaming about how he was just here to buy a squirt gun for his kids and I had no right to kick him out. More swearing. I wondered how often he behaved like this in front of his daughters.

“No, we don’t allow customers to treat us like this,” I said. “You really need to leave before I feel like I have to call the cops.”

The man left, angrily ranting the whole way.

This is the proudest moment of my entire life, and I talk about it regularly.

One of the most infuriating things about the job was how customers would let their kids just run rampant around the store. Bored kids would rearrange our shelves and their parents wouldn’t make them fix it. Hyperactive kids would dash around the patio furniture knocking over things. We constantly found broken items around the store.

I’m a parent now, so I understand being on vacation and wanting to do some shopping and just wanting the kids to keep themselves entertained for a couple minutes so you can pick out new sunglasses. But also as a parent, I have to ask: what the actual fuck. Do not let your kids make a massive mess for someone else to clean up, even if that someone else is a small-town minimum-wage employee.

This is why I was so impressed by the parents of the girl who tried to pay for the broken item. I worked at that store for five summers and that was the only time anyone offered to pay for a broken item.

Why was I thinking about all this? Well, the other day I was leaving the house without my purse. I tucked my keys into one pocket and my credit card and my ID into the other pocket. But why my ID? I wasn’t going to the liquor store and it has been a decade since I’ve been carded anyway. I never use my ID, but I always bring it with me if I’m bringing my credit card too.

Do you guys remember back in the 90s when everyone was writing “Check ID” in the signature area on their credit cards? Do you remember that we used to hand our credit cards over to the retail staff and they would actually check to make sure the signature on the slip matched the signature on the card? Or at least they were supposed to?

I remember that. I especially remember people being absolutely pissed when I would see “Check ID” written in their signature area and I would ask to see their ID. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re right. You only want people to check the ID when it’s a thief using your credit card. My bad.

One time I asked to see a guy’s ID and he said, “it’s in the boat.” I looked at his soggy shirt, squeaky water shoes, pink face, and windblown hair and thought that was probably true. I let the charge go through.

I don’t write “Check ID” on my credit cards, but it wouldn’t even matter if I did because nobody actually hands their credit card to a clerk anymore. I don’t even sign my credit cards. And yet there I was almost 25 years ago taking imprints of credit cards on carbon paper and checking identification like a goddamn fool.

For some reason this was my big lesson from this job: always carry your credit card and your ID together. Don’t leave your ID on the boat.

Also, don’t be an asshole to my coworker because I will kick you out of the store and then tell everyone about it for the rest of my life.