Bowled Over

There is a chill in the air, Thanksgiving leftovers are long gone, the Santas are popping up in every mall.  This can only mean:  Bowl Season.

My husband is a proud alumnus and #1 fan of the University of Oregon.  If you scratch him, he doth bleed—green and yellow.  Almost every casual piece of clothing he owns comes from the Duck Store, an Oregon-based shrine to Nike and the Ducks.  He has a baseball cap with a duck bill, every official bowl T-shirt from the past 20 years, sweatshirts, basketball shorts, golf-club covers, a gym bag, a license-plate frame, and even a bottle opener that when engaged in its intended use will spontaneously play the Oregon fight song.  For many years he would try to slip out of the house in the darkest hours of the morning before I could detect that he was wearing Kelly green corduroys, a yellow button-down shirt, and an official, duck-laden tie.

There are many behaviors that accompany Duck status.  For example, we pay monthly for an extended cable package that carries obscure stations likely to broadcast Oregon football games.  My husband has been known to stay up until wee hours watching games that begin at 11pm on a Saturday night Boston time.  On more than one occasion, we have sat in a hotel room in a fabulous city while he streams a game live over his laptop.

It was very shocking to discover that this fanaticism was a latent genetic trait, passed down to our son.  He also caught Duck Fever, eschewing the many fine schools in New England to venture 3,000 miles away in search of his fortunes in Eugene, Oregon.  In a few weeks, he will (G-d willing) add his name to the rolls of alumni who drank the green Kool-Aid and became insufferable, lifelong Ducks.  No doubt, when he finally grants me grandchildren (I’m in no hurry, by the way), they will quack, too. 

For thirty years, my life has been wound around these insipid football games.  I was sad for my husband when Oregon fell to Stanford this year, taking them out of the Pac-12 race despite a better win record and higher national ranking overall.  On the other hand, I was a bit relieved that we would be spared the Rose Bowl this year, or the inevitable disappointment of a BCS championship bid.   What I don’t understand is how a diehard fan can suddenly become interested in the fates of others.  Come bowl season, all bets are off.  It isn’t enough to watch while a “close-but-no-cigar” Oregon gets pitted against a random team from the Big 12.  Bowl season is a bacchanalian fete of football indulgence, watching hour after hour, day after day of football contests.  My husband becomes an alumnus emeritus of every university and must watch each game, from kick-off to Gatorade bath.

When this occurs, my options are few.  I can leave, spending the season engaged in shopping, eating and merriment alone.  Or I can stay, relegating myself to the role of hostess, serving up a constant supply of beer and beer-friendly foods.  They say if you can’t beat’em, join’em.  But I have chosen to approach this with passive aggressive civility and practiced indifference.   If anybody is looking for me, I’ll be hunkered down with two seasons—16 hours—of Downton Abbey.

Pet Peevish

I grew up in a home where ‘no’ was the prevailing wind.   The hallmarks of teenagehood—attending a school dance, a cute new pair of shoes, a stylish haircut—were normally met with a firm ‘no.’  Even on the rare occasions when my parents were inclined to allow me some liberty, like going to a party, there was always an unpleasant tax involved.  I would need to take my brother along, or wear what my mother picked out, or endure some embarrassing parent-designated reengineering of the circumstances.  After a while, there was no point in asking.  I learned instead to make excuses to my friends for why I was always busy.  

Perhaps this is why I have always had difficulty saying ‘no’ to my children.  That they know it and don’t bleed me dry speaks to their character.  I have always maintained that spoiling them is my greatest pleasure.  There are shelves and shelves of parenting books enumerating the reasons that this makes me a terrible mother.  Nonetheless, I am a sucker for the look in my son’s eyes when he’s sporting new sneakers, or my daughter’s breathless gasp at an exciting new book.

There is one area, however, where I am, hands down, intractable.  For as long as my children could walk and talk they have wanted a puppy; yet I seem to be incapable of giving in to this single wish. 

Long before the kids came along, my husband and I felt the need to expand our family.  It was impractical to start having children during his residency, but we were really hurting for the pitter-patter of little feet.  Despite my debilitating allergies, I was bamboozled into accepting a little kitten into our household.  The tiny ginger tabby stole my heart, following me everywhere and nuzzling against my heartbeat.  He seemed so lonely during the daytime when we were both at work that we followed up with a companion, a seal point Siamese of exceptional beauty and questionable manners.   After the kids came along and reached school age, I relented to a blue-tongued skink, a vegetarian reptile with limited growth potential.  Lizzie lived out her days in a large glass tank, subsisting on a diet of designer smoothies made of anything left in the produce drawer of the refrigerator.

There is one thing in common with these pets:  none of them had to be walked.  The cats were fastidious, learning to use their sequestered litter box or the great outdoors for their toilette.  They came and went easily enough, one more than the other, but they were basically low maintenance animals.  At no time, however, did I have to put a winter coat over my nightgown and walk them late at night.  Or put steaming poop in my pocket!

I have been taking note of pets and their owners for my entire life.  It seems that no matter what promises are made, it is the mother in the household that truly adopts a dog.  Children are not as good as their word, claiming automatic byes for homework, sports practice, music lessons, and any other event that arises.  Quite frankly, I refuse to be left holding the, er, leash.

Please don’t think me a bad person.  I can appreciate the sweetness and the beauty of these loyal creatures.  I am the first person to turn to the Westminster Dog Show when it is on and I even travelled to New York once to see it in person.  But I have a dark past with dogs that left me irrationally terrified around all canines.  Back when I was a child, my very young brother walked around the corner to play with his close friend.  The friend’s family was in the backyard, so my brother climbed over the fence to join them.  Their dog, true to his breeding, perceived my brother to be an intruder and attacked him, trying to protect its family.  We could hear my brother’s blood-curdling screams from our house.  I remember the way my mother dropped the kitchen knife from her hand and went running out the door, coming back holding my little brother in the air, his leg dripping with blood.  She grabbed a clean kitchen towel and headed for the hospital.  It was the first time I ever saw stitches.

To this day, I am anxious around dogs.  Almost every friend we have has at least one dog, and so does every member of the family.  I freeze up when dogs approach me, barely able to tolerate the obligatory ritual of sniffing and marking.  I particularly dislike dogs that jump in my lap.  For some reason, in a room full of people, I am the lap most likely to attract a dog (not sure what that says about me!).  The jumping and licking just makes me want to crawl under a rock--or jump into a vat of sanitizer.

So forgive me, my wonderful children, for failing at the one thing you have asked of me.  For the twentieth year in a row, there will be no puppy this holiday season.  I cannot assume the responsibility for a dog, and therefore am not worthy of one.  But if it’s any consolation, I will continue to love you, to put out your favorite food, to scratch your tummy, to brush your hair, and to clean up after you.  No pet can bring me what I get from the two of you.

World Traveler

I have become an avid and frequent traveler these days, but nothing compares to the grand tours I used to take as a youth.

I loved to head East, getting lost in the vast Golden Desert.  In those days, the specimens of cactus I encountered dwarfed my small frame, terrifying me with huge spines that were bigger and wider than my tiny fingers.  I loved to thread my way carefully among the deadly species to climb the forbidden mountain of rocks, reaching up to run my hands along the succulents whose smooth, bulging branches stayed cool against the raging sun.

Heading southward, all destinations passed the Frightening Fortress of Doom.  Its faded pink stucco walls were overrun with deep cracks, peeling away as if infected by plaster-eating bacteria.  The trolls who lived within the fortress kept their vigil at the watch station, casting an evil glance at those who dared to approach.  Get too close and a threatening, bony finger would emerge between the panes of glass.  There were two of them who alternated at their posts, never leaving the guard unattended.  The gravel path spoke of a once and forgotten moat, long dried up like the crotchety caretakers within.  While the structure and its inhabitants turned slowly to dust, the exiled dragons were returning to their native home.  I could often spy a few of the younger ones making their way cautiously toward the massive entrance.  I longed for the day when Man and Beast would clash in an epic battle for the future of the fortress.

To the West was Paradise, a lush tropical island where enchanted monkeys swung from coconut trees and fed themselves from the wild banana trees.  There, I would pluck a fresh hibiscus and tuck it behind my ear to blend with the natives.  The foliage was so dense that I could lounge for hours in its shade weaving garments from dried fronds, listening to the soft whisper as the cool breeze gently rustled the branches.  I loved to hunt for rosemallow buds.  Their delicate green sepals kept fast their precious secrets until they burst open magically to reveal an unexpected flash of color, sometimes a bright red, sometimes peach, and sometimes a daring yellow.

When I headed North, I found myself in Metropolis, a place where I felt oddly at home.  I loved its theatres and art museums, as well as the genial bohemians that welcomed me to play among them.  Sometimes I could pass as an extra in one of their shows, or duck into a studio and try my hand at an original work of art.  Other times it was fun just to be a spectator, watching with wonder as the local people did what they did best.  It was a place that surged with electricity and rocked with noise—where life was a stage for anyone with the talent and guts to step up.

It was easy to get lost in these worlds, but I knew I had to be home in time for dinner.  This was my neighborhood, and I was a seven-year old with training wheels.  My neighbor to one side, our family doctor, had a contemporary house with jagged roof lines.  It was painted a soft yellow and landscaped with a rock garden, large cacti and succulents.  Around the corner was a charming-yet-impossibly-old couple who made even my grandparents look young.  They held their own, but their home was sorely neglected and in need of maintenance, allowng lizards and other indigenous creatures to frolic merrily in their front yard.  The back side of our block was dense with a variety of high and low palms to the point of concealing the façade of the houses.  And our neighbors to the other side, some of the most naturally talented and creative people I have ever met, were always a hub of activity.  The mother and daughter were gifted artists; I loved to stand and study the many paintings that were hung gallery style from floor to ceiling.  The son had a rock band that rehearsed on weekends.  Sometimes, the kids would write a play, giving parts to all of the kids in the neighborhood, complete with sketches detailing how we were to be dressed.  It was in their home that I heard my first Beatles record.

There’s a reason these were called the Wonder Years.  It was a time when we were free to explore the inner workings of our own minds, developing strengths, tastes, and personality.   Ours was probably the last generation with this luxury, as today’s youth are driven to spend every waking hour in structured activities.  The imperative to remain competitive as a nation has pushed a burden upon our children, who are being pressed to learn more and more at a younger and younger age.  There is no time for innocence; no space for creativity.  Most of us long-ago-high-achievers would be hard-pressed to compete with those who are emerging at the tops of their high school classes today.  I am in awe of the capacity of today’s youth for science and analytical thought.  They are learning things in high school that even scientists did not know 30 years ago.  I can’t help but sigh a bit, however.  I truly hope that our precious children will be allowed to find their passions, and not just follow a path because they got good grades.

Con Heir

Since the time of Cain and Abel, children have been foolish enough to believe that they can pull one over on their parents.  To wit: the many antics of Beaver and Wally, the Brady Bunch, the Huxtable Kids, and these days, the variably-gifted kids of Modern Family.  My own father’s parenting philosophy was to offer a pre-emptive strike against youthful indiscretion.  He had been such a clever and conniving youth in his own day that he assumed mischief not in evidence, declaring us guilty until proven innocent.

It was truly unnecessary.  In fact, I was such a goodie-goodie as a child that I invested little to no creativity in the usual teenage shenanigans of smoking, shoplifting, taking the car, or throwing a party when the parents weren’t home.  If anything, my insistence on following the rules made me an unwelcome moral compass at gatherings, costing me dearly in social capital.  I was the very definition of uncool.  Nonetheless, there were a few safe havens around town where I found I could talk to boys without a chaperone, or eat forbidden chocolate to my heart’s content. 

I was also very good at working within the boundaries.  For example, I discovered that our school monitored the skipping of classes by comparing the attendance lists of each class to the homeroom attendance.  If you were absent from homeroom you were officially absent for the day, making any absence from classes allowable and excused.  If I wanted to skip class (something I only did during the last semester of senior year because, let’s face it, senioritis is a debilitating disease) I simply hid in the bathroom during homeroom and then took my leave from classes that weren’t worth my time.  Unfortunately, I was not aware that there were a maximum number of absences allowed per quarter.  After being ratted out by my guidance counselor, my parents approached me, but not with concrete evidence.   Instead they told me, “we know what you did,” and then forced me to confess, hoping all the while that I was confessing to the ‘right’ crime.

My own children have been eye opening to me.  My son, in particular, was remarkably gifted in the skill of youthful subterfuge.  He could be so convincing about alleged injustices brought down on him that I would get fired up and ready to take on any authority figure at school.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, you are so grounded.  ‘Nuff said.

But there is a new type of adaptive behavior among the 25-and-under crowd that is so very subtle I doubt most parents have even realized it.  I call it “stealth texting”—but it could just as easily be termed “rebel with a clause.”  Our kids are the first generation to come with cell phones as standard equipment.  It didn’t take long for parents and teachers to realize that while convenient, cell phones can also be evil.  Thanks to cell phones, kids no longer speak to each other (or us); nor do they make eye contact, or talk in complete sentences.   As a result, cell phones are banned from many secondary schools, and are cause for ejection from more and more college lectures.

Despite these restrictions, our kids are not going without.  My college-age kids text me all day long during class hours.  I always admonish them, (“Oh, the professor is rewinding a video. . .”) fearing that their precious “class participation grade” will be taken down a notch or two.  It turns out that their misbegotten conduct goes undetected.  This generation has evolved a texting countenance that we older folks fail to recognize.

Consider the way I use my iphone to send a text message.  I hold the phone out in front of me, extending my arms to my middle-age focal length, and then press the clumsy touch-screen buttons with both thumbs, all the while squinting at the screen to see whether auto-correct has altered my intended meaning.  Our children, by sharp contrast, are remarkably skilled at these devices, having much-practiced dexterity that surpasses ours by an order of magnitude.  While keeping the phone in a pocket or on the seat between their legs, they complete ten messages for every one of our own.  Without any discernible shift in their posture, they can sit at a dinner table or in a lecture hall and conduct several text conversations at once.  We interpret the fact that their eyes are cast downward as a sign of a narcissistic generation rather than as evidence that they are breaking the rules.

Although this behavior is easy for an adult to overlook, the kids themselves recognize it instantly.  It didn’t take long, for example, until every person under the age of 25 was not only texting at my Thanksgiving dinner, but they were texting each other!   Text transports them to a parallel universe wherein parents and teachers are pandered to and kids have free rein.

It is hard to break this cycle.  My husband uses text to communicate regularly with his residents at the hospital—a method that I allow because it is far preferable to having the phone ring every night at dinner time.  This limits my ability to enforce anyone else’s behavior.   I am not a fan of the old parental stand-by, “Do what I say; not what I do.”  And in fairness, the much concealed method the kids use is more insult than blatant disruption.

This year, when the kids return home for the holidays they will have a shocking surprise:  a new cell-phone basket.   Each time we sit down at the table together, we will all deposit our cellphones into the same receptacle for the duration of the meal.  They will hate it, but the way I see it, we only have a finite number of dinners left with just the four of us.  Soon they will move on and start families of their own.  That’s when I will enjoy sitting back and waiting for them to see their own behaviors reflected back in the faces of their own children.

Confessions of an Over-Educated Wench

By last count, I spent eighteen years of my life pursuing a formal education.  I do not regret any of the time I spent in college or graduate school.  In fact, I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to choose classes that truly interested me.  Studying the history of science, or art, or music is a luxury by today’s standards.   I thought it an important hallmark of being educated to read Plato and Aristotle, Dante, Shakespeare, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, to name a few.  I had no particular agenda in doing so; I just felt it needed to be done.  

In my earlier years of education I was a good and dutiful student.  I embraced the memorization challenges, the dioramas, the posters, and the extra credits.  In truth, I enjoyed having “projects” to occupy my mind and my hands.  On the other hand, when my children brought home these same assignments I saw them in a different light.  From a parental point of view, many activities were simply busy work.  Most of what I saw at my children’s school was obviously done under the “close supervision” of the parents.  It was funny that a physicists’ kids did physics projects, or that the judge’s kid wrote Constitutional law papers.

I look back somewhat longingly at my education years; but I also question what some of it was all about.   I realize that I have memorized about 1000 lines of poetry, all the state capitals and nicknames, all the presidents in order of their terms, the national anthems of France and Israel (each in their native languages), the periodic table of elements, solid and liquid measurements, all of Hamlet’s soliloquys, English to metric conversions, the counties in the State of Florida, the quadratic equation, dozens of geometry theorems (yes, corresponding parts of congruent triangles are congruent!), all the geological periods of the Earth, and, by virtue of a famous yet obscene mnemonic,  the twelve cranial nerves.  I also possess a rather uncanny ability to solve for X, no matter how deeply it is buried and replicated in a convoluted equation. 

All of this is rather amusing to me at this stage of my life.  I am not foolish enough to argue that none of the trappings of my education are responsible for the successful career I enjoyed.  Certainly we build our analytical and social skills around some basic fundamentals.  Who’s to say that when I imagined how our company might extend the information infrastructure of the hospital to its affiliated doctors’ offices and home care agencies I wasn’t somehow informed by the large Greek pots in the Museum of Fine Arts at which I spent hours staring.  Perhaps the symmetry and fragmentation of thematic material in Brahms’ 4^th Symphony was resonating when I reworked the means for doing hospital case mix analysis.

At the peak of my career, I liked to think that my education was really paying off for me—that the hours of reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic (not to mention a graduate degree in health policy and management) gave me a higher awareness for the plight of hospital administrators who were trying to reckon with the rapidly changing regulations and the information requirements that accompanied them.  But now, at what I believe is the peak of my life, I wonder how much of the knowledge and know-how I spent years gathering is still with me and relevant.  It reminds me of when a friend’s father told him, years ago, “I’ve already forgotten more than you’ll ever know.” 

After paying attention for a few weeks, I have decided that I use very little of what I learned  in school on a daily basis.  There is one notable exception.  During my senior year in high school, when I had more than enough credits to graduate and needed something to do until June, I signed up for a typing class.  With apologies to any of my very excellent former teachers, I have used my typing skills more than any other single thing I learned in high school.  It saved me hours in college because I possessed the ability to translate heavily-edited chicken scratch into a neatly printed manuscript in 30 minutes flat.  Typing also got me jobs during the summer months because I could exceed 50 words per minute on a self-correcting IBM Selectric.  Of course, the time I spent memorizing the parts of a typewriter for a final exam is a slice of life I will never get back.  Perhaps if I ever get on Jeopardy there will be an answer for which I can buzz in and say, “What is a platen?”

The trend to amass factoids continued through college.  As a music major I squirreled away more information about Western music than anyone could ever need.  Just last night at the Symphony, my husband turned to me before Jean-Yves Thibodet took the stage to perform Saint-Saens 5^th Piano Concerto, asking, “Have we heard this before?”  “Oh no,” I answered, “you’ve heard his 2^nd Concerto; this 5^th one is rarely played.”  Studying music leaves you with an easily accessible mental catalog of opus numbers and genres.  The trivia is endless, like the ten composers who wrote exactly 9 Symphonies.  Or the fact that Mozart is said to have written 41 symphonies, however, there is no 37 and there are at least 20 others that are under dispute.  When the Symphony Hall station of XM radio is on in the car, my husband likes to see if I can “Name that Tune” in less than 3 notes.  Truthfully, it doesn’t usually take that many.  Don’t mistake this for bragging.  I am seriously struggling to understand whether there is any intrinsic value to being “Google Unplugged.”

One of the silliest things I ever learned is a trick for remembering the “relative minor” for each major key.  Every major key  (C major, G major, D major. . .) has a unique “key signature”—the number of sharps or flats that defines that key.  For example, A major has 3 sharps (F#, C#, G#) and B-flat major has 2 flats (B-flat, E-flat).  A relative minor is the minor key that shares the same key signature as a major key.  The relative to A major is F# minor and the relative to B-flat is G-minor.  My first piano teacher taught me a ridiculous hopping tune (duh-dum, duh-dum, duh-dum) where you start at the major key and then sashay downward in 3 half-steps to find the relative minor key.  To go from minor to major, simply reverse the tune upward.  It is utterly ridiculous, but it stuck at a very young age and has never failed me.  Linking relative majors and minors is critical information when you are analyzing a great symphony, as it sometimes helps to explain the tonal plan of the movements or to make sense of a harmonic journey during an intricate development section.  It offers no value, however, when you are doing estate planning, choosing a candidate to back in the next election, or calculating the impact of refinancing your mortgage.

The other day someone asked me whether August had 30 or 31 days.  I resorted to an old tool I was taught so long ago I can no longer remember its origin.  I made a fist and counted my knuckles and in-between, starting with January.  The knuckles are the months with 31 days and the valleys in-between are the months with 30 (or 28).  For August, you double count the last knuckle and head back toward the starting point.  Of course, August has 31 days.  But what does it mean that I use this simple convention more often than a quadratic equation, or the capital of Montana, or the birthday of the 19^th President of the United States. 

I suppose in the end, it’s never been about what we know but how we use it.   As Dostoyevsky said, “It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.”

Stupid Husband Tricks

Let me make one thing perfectly clear:  my husband is not stupid.  He is, in fact, a brilliant and accomplished scholar, a gifted surgeon, and a well-read, Renaissance man.  But for all his intellectual greatness, he is a hopeless klutz at home, guilty of huge breaches in common knowledge and common sense.  This dichotomy between his workhead and his homehead is so pronounced that I often accuse him of planned incompetence.  He demonstrates such a pattern of uselessness that I exempt him from household duties.  Let’s face it; some things are just easier to do myself.

One of the dangers of living with such a man is that he often tries to cover up his indiscretions.  For example, he will break a glass bowl all over the kitchen and then hastily clean it up, going so far as to take out the telltale trash.  Unfortunately, his tidying skills reflect a lack of attention to detail.  On one such occasion, he left so many pieces of glass on the floor that I cut my foot the next morning.  On the other hand, had he fessed up to the deed, I would have known instantly that the kitchen needed a thorough vacuuming and would have avoided bare feet for a few days.

I live in a constant state danger.  The more time my husband spends alone in our home, the higher the risk to my life and limb.  One day, I came home from a rather stressful business trip nearly delirious with exhaustion.  My husband offered to feed the kids while I stretched out on the sofa to rest.  I went into the living room—a room we rarely use—to put up my feet and close my eyes.  While I was adjusting the throw pillows to cradle my head, I noticed small dots—like chocolate sprinkles—along the back of the sofa.  I called out for my husband, “What is this stuff all over the couch?”  My eyes began to focus, allowing me to see that there were well over a few little flecks.  In fact I was lying in them.

At this point my husband made his way to the living room entrance and was mumbling something I did not quite grasp while I continued to process what I was finding.  Before I could register his words, something cracked me hard on the head, as if I were hit from behind by an intruder.  I lost my bearings momentarily, but I could have sworn that things were flying in circles around the room.  After a few seconds I was hit again, only this time it was more like something had used me as a launch pad.  I started waving my hands around my head in self-defense, closing my eyes and dropping to the floor.  With my arms wrapped around my head, I opened my eyes and looked down on the ground.  There were more of the little brown specks.

Suddenly it was quiet.  My husband looked at me sheepishly, not moving from his perch at the doorway.  He seemed unconcerned.  “It’s nothing,” he said.  

“What did you do!?” I demanded. 

He explained that he had removed the cast iron trap that fit over the fireplace in the adjoining library because he had been considering trying to light a fire.  Our home was an 1880 farmhouse built around a central chimney.  There were back-to-back fireplaces on the first floor that also opened up into two of the bedrooms upstairs.  When he removed the covering, a “family” of squirrels raced into the house.  They ran around for a while and he managed to chase most of them back up the chimney and then replaced the heavy iron cover.  But he could not be sure if they all retreated; in fact, he was not at all surprised that one remained in the house.  Of course, all I could think about was the fact that I had lay in squirrel droppings and now had them stuck in my hair and all over my clothes.

Now, squirrels are basically flying rats that carry G-d-knows-what diseases.  We had two small children in the house.  After my husband made a valiant (probably 30 second) effort to locate the crazy squirrel he simply forgot about it.  Out of sight, out of mind.  We now had a health hazard loose in our home.

Fortunately, the nasty critter was probably getting hungry, which brought him out of hiding.  We managed to scare the feisty beast into the downstairs bathroom and close the door.  I called animal control and waited, while my husband got the kids out of the house.  At last the doorbell rang, and the biggest, scariest woman entered; she carried a small cage and wore big, thick gloves.  Before entering the bathroom, she warned me not to open the door no matter what I heard until she knocked three times.

I think I could do a better job illustrating what happened next if I were a cartoon artist.  Imagine the visible white hash marks that indicate incessant banging from inside the room while the door itself pushes elastically from the inside until it bulges visibly from its hinges.  The noises that emanated sounded like a dozen gangsters were knocking each other senseless.  It was clear the squirrel was running around and around from floor to ceiling.  Suddenly there was quiet.  Then the animal control woman let out a mortal yell, followed by, “F*#@&, he bit me!”  The nasty creature chomped right through her massive gloves and drew blood between her index finger and thumb.

I do not know whether my husband ever considered how much worse this scenario could have been.  He kept away with the kids for a long time.  He knew there would be stern words and even worse, intensive cleaning chores.  I spent hours vacuuming and mopping.  I had to have the sofa shampooed, and even then I never sat on it again until it was eventually reupholstered.

After thirty years of marriage, I am at a loss for how to motivate my husband to apply the level of analytical scrutiny at home that he reserves for his work.  He can scan pages of data tables and know intuitively that a p value is wrong, yet he cannot see a dried piece of spinach on a white porcelain plate when it is removed from the dishwasher.    I guess that’s how I know that he will always need me around.

Searching for Santa Claus

I love it when the news makes me laugh for a change.

I am still chuckling over a news story from last week where a man was arrested for telling children that Santa Claus did not exist.  The intoxicated man walked along a parade route that included a Santa on a float waving to all the children.  The man, a paroled ex-con, insisted on telling every child he encountered that the jolly man with a beard was a fake and that there was no such thing as Santa Claus.  This created a strange sort of mayhem that had the police on a brief manhunt, seeking the horrible man who reportedly had his hair done up like horns.  He was charged with breach of parole, causing a disturbance and public drunkenness.  Apparently, Canada has no law against breaking a child’s heart. 

Santa Claus is one of the few things that the world has done right.  I remember when I first became exposed to Santa Claus at the 163rd Street Shopping Center as a young child (that was before there were malls).  Santa represented all that was good about being a kid:  toys, love, joy, laughter, magic and wonder.  He also taught important values, like being “deserving”—a concept employers emulate today, calling it “pay for performance.”  Because of Santa, parents are able to threaten their children to behave for weeks without having to be the heavy.   Santa is the perfect fantasy for children and the perfect scapegoat for parents.

Like most Jewish kids in America, I was jealous of those who got to celebrate Christmas.  The hype and commercialism were infectious, working me into a material girl lather.  I reasoned that if Santa were real, he would not discriminate against me merely on the basis of religion.  After all, he loved all children and just wanted them to behave.  So I took one of my long knee socks—it was the closest thing to those stockings I had seen in the store—and attempted to hang it to receive Santa’s bounty.  There was just one catch.  My South Florida home was missing an important feature.  Just how would Santa find his way to my house when we didn't have a fireplace?  The answer:  he didn’t!

Years later I was surprised to discover the lengths to which adults went to preserve the myth of Santa Claus.  For many years I worked for a man who had three young sons, just a bit older than my own children.  His family had elaborate rituals designed to create a sense of Christmas magic for his children, taking great pains to keep his children under Santa’s spell.  When the oldest lost his Santa innocence, he was quickly sworn to secrecy.  The same with the middle child, just to preserve the wonderment experienced by the youngest.  When the Tim Burton film “Nightmare Before Christmas” came out (one of our family’s favorites) I tried to loan it to him for his family to watch.  He refused to bring it home, believing that it was based on the idea that Santa did not exist.  (In fact, the film does just the opposite!)  I finally realized that he was still holding on to some of that belief-in-Santa magic himself.

There are so few things on which we as a society can agree.  That’s why I love Santa.  For me, it has nothing to do with religion, or spirituality, or faith.  More and more, Santa reminds us what it used to be like to be a kid—holding on to a time when life is as simple as “good things happen to good people.”  The world is a tough place and getting tougher all the time.  Isn’t it wonderful when we can allow kids to be kids just a little while longer?