It's Canada Day tomorrow!

... and that means that it's time to show your low-key but still patriotic affection for your country by making a kitschy dessert.

Like this one that I made last year:

Yeah, that was magnificent. The recipe is here, should you feel inspired to make a (likely better) version yourself.

Or you could make a red-and-white Canada Day cake.

Or you could make some festive cupcakes.

Or you could express your True Patriot Love by drinking a Caesar.

So tomorrow, we'll be doing the small-town Canada Day thing. I hope that you have a fun and relaxing day tomorrow, whatever you'll be doing.

Angels

If you were a girl child in the 70s, Charlie's Angels probably figured largely in your life. This amuses me - who among us would even LET our young children watch a sleazy show like that now? Ah, the 70s, that era of just TERRIBLE parental judgement.

Anyhow.

I remember playing Charlie's Angels ALL the time on the schoolyard and with friends and I was always stuck being the turtleneck-wearing nerd Angel, Sabrina Garrett. I'm reading a lot of Charlie's Angels reminisces these days and the authors always claim that they voluntarily chose to be Sabrina, which causes me to make my skeptical face, since all of the little girls I knew fought viciously to be the sexy Angels - Jill Munroe, played by the ethereally gorgeous Farrah Fawcett, and to a much lesser extent, the brunette Kelly Garrett. NO ONE wanted to be Sabrina. EVERYONE wanted to be racecar-driving Jill Munroe with her perfect hair and her short shorts and her rollerskates, and that role was always reserved for the prettiest girl on the playground, her long straight blond hair waving behind her.

We learn to value other things as we get older, if we are lucky. If we were playing Charlie's Angels now, you and me, we probably would fight over who would get to be Sabrina, with her turtlenecks and her smarts, because adulthood - if we are lucky - brings with it the knowledge that some traits age better than others, that luminous golden beauty does not trail happiness in its wake. And Farrah Fawcett's life seems to be a prime example of this, a life that added up to... what, exactly? A hair-do, a few made-for-tv movies, a screw up for a kid, a final brave fight against cancer, and even her death was overwhelmed, in the end, by the death of a more famous weirdo.

Even so. I was sorry to hear of her death, sorry and sad to an extent that surprised me. Of course, her death was sad and hard and unearned - but death is often like that. What was I so sad about, I wondered, half-bemused? Was I sad for the flaky* b-list celebrity, sad for her final bit of heroism? Or was I sad for my own self, for being trapped in my own smart skin and watching a pretty blond girl run across the school yard being the prettiest girl in the world, sad for the flimsy fairy's gold of beauty, sad for childhood's end?

(*the "flaky" bit wasn't meant to be dismissive - it was based on an interview with Farrah where she'd dismissed herself rather heart-breakingly as a "blonde nothingness.")

Who's Bad?

So how much do we own the very famous?

Michael Jackson was one of the few remaining Very Famous left, famous not for his achievements - which mainly happened in the 80s, back when he was mainly known for being talented and only mildly eccentric - but as a personality, as The Person Who Wanted To Own The Elephant's Man's Bones And Was Best Friends With Elizabeth Taylor, as The Guy Who Dangled His Child Off A Hotel Balcony And Was Repeatedly Accused Of Being A Child Molester. Oh, AND THE MAN WHO WENT FROM BEING AN ATTRACTIVE BLACK MAN TO A FREAKY LOOKING BONE-WHITE PERSON OF NONSPECIFIC GENDER.

You know, THAT guy.

I don't think there's a new generation of the Very Famous coming up - Twitter is doing a dandy job of revealing the banal heart at the center of celebrity, as famous people who REALLY should have better things to do treat us to all of their dopey, pedantic, 140 characters or less thoughts. A friend recently found out that a long-time favorite actor is A GREAT BIG GOOF thanks to Twitter - and imagine that with every famous person out there right now, and what happens is a generation of celebrities who will never become more than the briefly interesting, a generation of micro-celebrities. And there's no big shared culture anymore, either, so we're all unlikely to buy the same cd like we did back in 1984. It's not going to happen again.

This is fine with me: how poorly do we think of ourselves that we've elevated some gap-toothed vulgarian like Madonna to the status of a Medici? Before we might have liked celebrities, but now - if all of the mean gossip sites are anything to go by, and I suspect they are - we REALLY hate them, these people with their good looks and their money and their drugged-up, misled lives. And our celebrities are more inherently hateable these days, I think, because what normal person would willingly sign themselves up for what any halfway intelligent person KNOWS comes along with celebrity? So there's pretty much nothing but addled attention junkies and their messed up lives and we're interested in them for 4 minutes until they get too gross and then we're off to the next one.

Joseph Merrick - the Elephant Man, victim of a cruel, deforming disease - was apparently of special significance to Jackson, who saw in him, perhaps, another person totally removed from the sea of normal humanity. Jackson had his publicist spread the story that he wanted to buy Merrick's bones, a story he later regretted, apparently, when it turned out that it would make people think he was really weird. No, REALLY?

But Joseph Merrick really was a victim, a human being who had almost no chance of living a reasonably normal life, victimized by a hideous disease that he had done nothing to deserve. Jackson - with his hits from 25 years ago and his stupid amusement park and his (AT THE LEAST) inappropriate relationship with little boys - has been cast as a victim, too. Was he victimized by his monstrous father? Was he victimized by poorly treated mental illness and easy access to drugs? Or was he victimized by the very celebrity that told him from a very early age that he was special, that he was set apart - was he victimized, in short, by us?

This being Thursday

... I am posting at 5 Minutes for Parenting, of course. Today, I wrote about my Boy, who is hovering in some uncomfortable place between the tall schoolboy he looks like and the little boy he actually is and then I wrote about my feeeeeeelings. See you there!

Hey You Guys: Cut It Out

For those of you who follow me - however unwisely - on Twitter, you're likely aware that the past few days have been really upsetting. For those of you who don't, here's the story in a nutshell:
1) My brother and sister-in-law are expecting their first baby in August.
2) My sister-in-law is 31 weeks pregnant this week.
3) When she developed scary pregnancy complications.
4) And ended up in the hospital.

.... which we all thought was going to lead to 5) The premature birth of my very first niece but instead looks like it's going to lead to 5) My poor sister-in-law being on bedrest for the rest of her pregnancy. And bedrest isn't fun, but I'd like to request prayers that their baby STAYS PUT for several more weeks.

So that's been keeping me glued to the phone for the past several days.

I almost bought a dog today - there was a Bichon Frise puppy for sale in the paper, so my dad and I were like "ROAD TRIP! ROAD TRIP TO BUY A PUPPY!". Good thing I've learned some moderation in my adult years, and chose instead to wait to discuss this with my husband upon his return from The Magical Place Where He Makes Puppy Money. OF course, that was incredibly stupid of me, because now after our reasonable adult discussion, I find myself agreeing that remaining in our DOGLESS STATE is the correct and adult thing to do. I should have just gone and bought the puppy and then greeted my husband at the door with the puppy and me saying "What's that, puppy? You wuv daddy? Daddy wuvs you too!".

So anyhoo. My niece needs to stay put, I need a puppy AND it's too hot out. The end.

Summer, Ugh.

My cousin has been visiting from way down in Southern Ontario all this week, and he said something which struck me as very, very funny.

"You forget how bad mosquitoes are when you're living down South," he said, slapping himself furiously.

And it's not just mosquitoes. The Baby got bitten by some sort of horrid bug last night in the yard, and the mark - in between her shoulder blades - immediately welled up into a raised white welt.

So bugs are Number One of my Things I Hate About Summer List.

Number Two is whiny kids.

I LIKE my kids. If this blog is about nothing else - and it's pretty much not - it is about how much I like my kids and motherhood and the whole shebang. But summer is a bit of a strain. My kids whine and fight and complain and I rapidly lose my mind. And YES, some mothers can implement strict discipline and schedules and their kids smarten right up, but I'm more of a Finger Painting On The Porch Mom and a bit lax on the whole "discipline" thing. Result? Mama's drinkin'.

Number 3 is the looming expectancy that I spend so much freaking time OUTSIDE.
The nice thing about winter is that NO ONE EXPECTS YOU TO GO OUTSIDE WHEN IT IS -40. NO ONE. But come summer, if you're not outside getting sun stroke at EVERY MOMENT OF THE DAY, there is this vast societal disapproval.

I hate going outside, with a few exceptions. I like sitting in a lawn chair on a mild day and reading a magazine. I like wandering around the yard at dusk, drink in hand, admiring the Grecian ruins and the shrubbery. But there is this expectation during the summer that YOU WILL GO TO THE BEACH AND YOU WILL LIKE IT. And my goodness, but I am not a beach person. I get headaches in bright sunlight and I shy away, hissing and scuttling, from sports. I am not, to sum up, outdoorsy.

We have decided, culturally, that being outdoorsy is indicative of Great Moral Strength - and I don't know WHO decided that, but it was likely the same people who decided that the fiber in your diet was the exact equivalent of your moral fiber. But I like reading and... sitting... and I resent a bunch of highly toned, tanned, birdseed-eating jocks taking the moral high ground on how much, exactly, I am making out of any particular day.

Number 4? People wearing skimpy outfits.

NOBODY looks good in skimpy outfits, unless they're an 18 year old gymnast and THEY ARE PROBABLY NOT. Yesterday I went to the grocery store and there I saw:
- A woman of roughly 48, who weighed roughly 248 pounds, wearing a bikini top and a sarong. Her lower back tattoo, fyi, said "Spank This." No thank you. My hands are too busy shielding my EYES.
- Another woman - this one close to 70 - wearing navy short-shorts. They might have looked swell back in the 1970s, but by now, her falling butt cheeks were hanging sadly beneath the hems, like two tragically deflated white grapefruits.
- A man this time, in his pot-bellied mid-life, wearing shorts - the SHORT kind - black socks to his knees, work boots and... nothing else.

Yes, it IS hot out. It certainly is. Let us not make anything worse by scalding my poor, poor eyes.

What do YOU hate about summer? Or are you unequivocally a fan? Let me know.

Summer Mixed Tape 2009

Just like - if you're close in age to me - in high school! Except it's harder to take this one with you - still pretty close to summery aural perfection.

Summer Songs

It is all at once summer here, with intense heat and sudden thunderstorms and the constant hum of mosquitoes - and I need some summer music. You know the type - happy, carefree, relaxed... and of course, I can't think of ANYTHING. All of the music I listen to is apparently wintery, melancholy stuff.

So HELP me find some summer music for lounging around my yard and trips to the beach and avoiding wearing a bathing suit at ALL COSTS, and I'll make a playlist out of the suggestions on Sunday night.

Here's what I've come up with so far:
Halo by Beyonce. Yes, it practically scalded my fingers to type that, but who cares? The song is dreamy summer perfection.
Beyonce - Halo
Blonde on Blonde by Nada Surf

My post today!

It's over here. The title of it amused me for AGES. Oh, clever clever me.

Posts I Am Thinking About Writing

1) A really ranty one about an anonymous-ish email I got from someone who saw fit to tell me that I write less about The Boy than I do about my daughters and thus I obviously love him less.

...

He has ASKED me not to write about him, OKAY? I mean, he finds me embarrassing enough and the very idea that I might write things about him for strangers to read bothers him for some mysterious reason.

Why am I not writing this post?
Phhph. Who cares what some anonymous stranger thinks?

2) A parody of Gwynth Paltrow's GOOP newsletters.
Urge. To. Mock. Overwhelming. Me.

Why am I not writing this post?
Oh, vague "I'm trying to be a kind person" sort of reasons. Meanwhile, I anxiously await her emails every week and read my husband choice selections: miracle diets that make you hallucinate! William Joel!

3) Video games and the mid-30s ladies who luv them.
I think video game designers went along for a long time not being quite sure about how to design video games that appealed to the feminine gaming crowd - I mean, slap a bow on her head all you want, but I STILL do not want to play Ms. Pac Man. They sure have figured it out NOW, though. THE SIMS! HARVEST MOON! ANIMAL CROSSING!

Why am I not writing this post?
I am pretending that my identity as a big dork is still a secret.

4) A post about my husband's in-the-works blog and how TOTALLY excited I am about it.

Why am I not writing this post?
Mainly because it's vaguely pathetic. I mean, I've been married to the man for NEARLY 11 YEARS. We've been in some sort of relationship or another for... whoa, 19 years. What goes on in his head should not be that big of a mystery to me, and yet I KNOW that every post he writes will be completely scrutinized by me for hidden meaning and depths.

So of course the poor man keeps working on his borders and headers and stuff. Who can blame him?

5) A post about how things are fine and there's nothing wrong but I just don't feel like writing these days, really.

Why am I not writing this post?
Who wants to write about not writing?

Anyhoo. So that's it. How are YOU doing these days? Tell me what you're up to in your lovely summer - or winter, should you be Australian - weather.

The Baby Sounds Off

On Linguistics. And Cheese.

"Mozzarella is a very stylish word."

On Keeping One's Elders Amused.

"Papa, I have a new game for us. It is called You Sit There And I Dump This Shovel Of Sand On Your Head."

On Timeless Beauty.

"Oh, I love this dress! It's so antique and pretty. It reminds me of long-time ago girls, like from seven years ago."

On Linguistics, Part II.

"I am inventing a new language because I am tired of saying no in English all of the time."

Another day,

another post that is someplace else. Here's my post for today, in which I inarticulately try to explain a revelation I had this morning.

Posts about fish and loss

I have a new post up at Canada Moms Blog. It is about a moderately ill-fated fishing trip that my kids went on this weekend and then I get all moody and stuff. I should write these descriptive blips for a living, eh? I am awesome at them.

Over and Over and Over

I think most readers have beloved books, books that instantly spell comfort. I have books that I reread frequently, some of which have been favorites for well over 20 years. You would think I would be rather tired of them by now, but apparently my being a creature of utter habit extends entirely into my reading as well.

1. Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson
This book has been a great favorite of mine for well over 15 years. My copy is disgracefully dog-eared and is the cause of this list, since my husband noticed me reading it in bed the other night. It was hard not to notice, since I insisted upon reading particularly funny bits out loud to him, while half-choking with laughter.

I'm also snorting with laughter right now, reading some of the Official Reviews on Amazon. The Library Journal mentions that the book is offensive (as we all know, the heights of humour are wholesome and reached in such literary gems as Reader's Digest) and "self-indulgent." HA! It's a TRAVEL MEMOIR, the single most self-indulgent literary genre*! So be warned. Bryson is a crabby, offensive, frequently smutty and self-indulgent author. He is also very, very funny.

* aside from the therapy memoir genre. But you couldn't PAY me to read one of those.

2. Persuasion - Jane Austen
Wherein we may find the single greatest literary letter ever:

"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are
within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not
that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer
myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke
it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman,
that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have
been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have
brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can
you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days,
could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can
hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink
your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be
lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You
do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to
be most fervent, most undeviating, in

F. W.

"I must go, uncertain of my
fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A
word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this
evening or never."

Le sigh.

It's a strangely melancholy book. Whenever I reread it - and that has been at least once a year since I was 15 or so - I am left with a profound sadness despite the happy ending.

3. The Magician's Nephew - C. S. Lewis
I'm not saying that this is the best of the Narnia books, but it is my favorite. Polly's pirate cave in the attic! Horrible Uncle Andrew! Digory crying in the garden and the apple he brings to his dying mother! The room of the Kings and Queens of Charn! The creation of Narnia! Good stuff.

4. The Collected Stories of Colette
I bought my battered copy at a second hand book store when I was 17. It's been toted everywhere with me ever since, and brings with it a strange, lost world - artists in France in the 20s, starving Parisian theatre folk, and the desperation of WWI. It's also terribly sophisticated and worldly in a way that I was starving for when I was young and find rather amusing now, and a wonderful summery read.

5. If You Want To Write - Brenda Ueland
I don't remember how or when this book happened into my hands, but it has been a tremendous blessing and comfort over the years. I've loaned it to literally dozens of people, too. It's a life-enhancing meditation on the utter importance of writing what is true and what is real, and it is a joy.

6. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
I first read this book when I was 9 or so and MUCH too young to have any idea what was going on. SOMETHING was, I was certain. And now I know! Growing up has its deep pleasures.

So. What books are your favorites, your comfort books?

I read a book.

Oh, clever, clever me. And I wrote about it over here.

Doesn't Martha Stewart's Cupcakes sound like it could be the name of something smutty? But no, it's not - unless you're one of those people who equate one's moral fiber with the amount of fiber in your diet. In any case, I read it, I felt mixed about it and I wrote about it here.

Today's post

..is here.
I am having one gosh-darn heck of a morning with The Baby, so I'm going to go put a cold compress on my head and practice my deep breathing. See you there!

Picnic

My mother grew up in a community of farms and farmers, farms that had been operated by the same families for a hundred years or more, intertwined on a small island.

These farmers were much the same - taciturn, intelligent, lanky men with kind, practical hearts and drawers full of medals from WWII, and their capable wives who ran the UCW and made pies and raised housefuls of fine children - and every year they would have a community picnic. There were sack races and fishing ponds and a huge spread of food and it was a good, good time.

My parents bought their farm in the late 1970s. There were - and still are - long-standing farming neighbourhoods in this town, but they bought instead in a less-expensive rural area, a place where the farms had all been sold away, and where there were only ghosts of the foundations of the old churches, the old schools remained. So our neighbours were bitter back-to-the-landers, these 60s remnants who thought they could escape the contagion of society and failed, of course. They were large, poor families renting falling down farmhouses full of their dirty-haired, feral children. They were people too reclusive and too angry to live in town, people who needed large houses and sprawling out buildings because they hoarded, people with 15 dogs. And there were, of course, other farmers, people who had bought a farm and then needed to work a whole other full-time job while farming and while falling into permanent crippling debt and while their children became fat and pale and weird.

There should be a community picnic, my parents decided.

You may guess how well that went, and you'll have to guess because I have no memories of it other than wandering aimlessly through a bush, looking at the dappled sunlight falling on ferns and hearing the sounds of raised adult voices just steps away from the trees. I know they tried twice, but it died a well-deserved death and was never attempted again.

I snark a lot about Baby Boomers, about their harmful idealism, and one of their most harmful ideas was this idea that community could be created. But of course it can't, anymore than I can make a man out of playdough and then command it to BREATHE, DAMMIT! Communities are an organic thing, a fragile lifeform, and when the old farmers died the community died with them. The new people who moved in - and obviously I was cruel while I wrote that description of them, but still - were not capable of making anything like a community, not capable of being anything more than people who lived in a constant semi-hostile state on adjoining properties.

The island where my mother grew up only has a handful of residents left. Their children all moved away because Toronto is where the jobs are and because farming hasn't paid in decades and because moving away is what we do now. The only well-occupied place is the community graveyard, full of the well-tended graves of good old men, their bodies lying in the hard-working dirt with the bodies of their neighbours, peaceful, gentle old men who deserved a better epitaph than their farms lying empty and fallow, the picnic grounds still echoing with the gone voices of their children.

A guest post by my DAD!

Over here!

Drying Paint

for Amber

My girls are sharing a room again, and the room's previous colour - a jolly frog belly green -became all at once too boyish. So we took the girls' to the paint store and they stood silently staring at the wall of paint samples - The Baby overwhelmed by all of the choices, The Girl sullen with resentment that she was going from having a room to herself to sharing yet again.

Pink? Too babyish.
Purple? Too gloomy.

"That one," said The Baby, reaching up and grabbing a sample that was robin's egg blue, blue like a Tiffany box.The Girl shrugged, refusing to take any sort of responsibility. So blue it would be, and the paint went into the magical paint shaking machine to my younger children's delight, while The Girl sat sullenly on a stool, staring angrily off into space, looking for the distant planet where The People Who Would Understand Her lived.

The Baby ran up and down the stairs while her room was being painted, the jolly froggy green vanishing beneath the strokes of blue, this familiar space suddenly becoming new. Go look, we urged The Girl! It looks magical! It is blue like a robin's egg, blue like a Tiffany box!

She slowly marched up the stairs and came back down again, shrugging her shoulders.
"It's the same old baby room," she said. "It's just blue instead of green."

When the paint had dried and their furniture had been moved back in, the girls were able to spend their first night in their redecorated room. I went up before bedtime to check on them and looked for a long time at my sleeping Girl, who had gone to bed so angrily. And I had been angry with her, too, for her seeming ingratitude, for her inflexibility, for her growing past the sweet, golden haired toddler now only seen in photographs.

There's an old Victorian poem that goes:
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-vein'd stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells, A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins,
ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.

And so had she, carefully arranging a few of her small treasures on her table before falling asleep with - my heart - tears drying on her face. How cruel we'd been, I thought, how cruel to wrest her unwilling from her small dominion, her one claim to maturity in the house. How thoughtless we'd been with our little bird, our pearl, now sleeping forlornly in a room that is the blue of a robin's egg, the blue of a Tiffany box.