Family Bed: Taking It Too Far

Here's a update to an earlier post about what sleep--or lack thereof--is like around our house.

When Mavis jumped up on our bed and settled herself as close as she could get into the crook of Ralph's knees at 4:48 this morning I got the brilliant idea that what we need is not a king-size set up like we have, but an accordion mattress--one that expands as the need arises--much like a dining table to which you add more leaves for company. 

That's because when I went to sleep around midnight, it was just Ralph and me, taking up a concentrated amount of space in the middle of the bed--about the size of a double. When Julia joined us around 3:00 a.m., splayed out in the middle, we expanded to a queen. By the time Mavis came along, I was hanging off the edge like Cary Grant clinging precariously to some president's nose on Mt. Rushmore in the great Alfred Hitchcock movie North by Northwest. Maybe we needed a California king at that point.

Like dreams, most ideas you have in the wee hours don't really hold up when daylight comes. But I'm sticking with my accordion bed invention. Anyone up for investing?

Media: Old and New Are in It Together

I'm getting more and more used to reading if not entire newspapers online then at least a handful of key stories every day and surfing around to see what's new with Sarah Palin, so, strictly as a reader, yesterday's announcement that the Christian Science Monitor is shutting down its print publication and going online didn't particularly bother me. As a journalist, of course, it seems like a big deal, especially coupled with the news that Gannett is laying off thousands of people. But David Carr, the New York Times media columnist, explains why it was a bad day for anyone who cares about the news in a way I hadn't previously understood: 

The answer is that paper is not just how news is delivered; it is how it is paid for. 

More than 90 percent of the newspaper industry's revenue still derives from the print product, a legacy technology that attracts fewer consumers and advertisers every single day. A single newspaper ad might cost many thousands of dollars while an online ad might only bring in $20 for each 1,000 customers who see it.

The difference between print dollars and digital dimes -- or sometimes pennies -- is being taken out of the newsrooms that supply both. And while it is indeed tough all over in this economy, consider the consequences.

New Jersey, a petri dish of corruption, will have to make do with 40 percent fewer reporters at The Star-Ledger, one of the few remaining cops on the beat. The Los Angeles Times, which toils under Hollywood's nose, has one movie reviewer left on staff. And dozens of communities served by Gannett will have fewer reporters and editors overseeing the deeds and misdeeds of local government and businesses.

I'm curious to know where you get your news. And if you'd like to throw in the name of your favorite blog, I'd like to know that, too, since that seems to be the way journalism is heading.  

 

Sarah Palin and the "Post-Palate Era"

With Ralph and the kids out canvassing for Obama, this past Saturday marked the first time since Sam was born in 2002 that I was in the house, alone, without a deadline looming. And since I married a man who not only loves to cook but is also a forceful presence in the kitchen (this is my diplomatic way of saying he's a kitchen fascist), it was one of the few times since Ralph and I met that I was in charge of cooking for a dinner party. 

Is food like music, I wonder. Do we go back to the recipes we relied on when we were starting out on our own in the same way that most of us never really progress past the music we liked in high school and college? My anthem: Earth Wind and Fire's "September." My dish: Chicken Marbella. 

For anyone who doesn't know, Chicken Marbella, distinguished by the colors and flavors of prunes, green olives, and capers, comes from The Silver Palate Cookbook. One of the people who didn't know about the book was our 20-something dinner guest, who was, after all, two or three when it came out in 1982. 

But when I was in my 20s, it was THE go-to cookbook--a bridge between the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook of my mother's heyday and epicurious.com and foodchannel.com now. And for me, it was also a highly personal book, because my first apartment in New York, a furnished one-bedroom on the top floor of a five-story-walkup on West 73rd Street, was kitty-corner across Columbus Ave. from the Silver Palate, a snail's shell-size storefront that sold the same gourmet food as the cookbook set forth. Although there was nothing especially revolutionary about either the store or the book, both were emblematic of America's burgeoning food culture

--and culture, in general--in the '80s. As the authors, Sheila Lukins and Julee Rosso write in the intro: 

The Silver Palate was born of two women's personal desperation. Our lives had become increasingly active and it was getting more and more difficult to juggle it all. There were school schedules, business appointments, political activities, art projects, sculpting classes, movie going, exercising, theater, chamber music concerts, tennis, squash, weekends in the country or at the beach, friends, family, fund raisers, books to read, shopping that couldn't be avoided, and, last, but not least, trying to prepare creative, well-balanced meals daily and an occasional dinner party at home. It was much too much. The wonder women we thought and were being told we were, had to acknowledge we might not be.

It certainly sounds tough! I can't imagine trying to fit squash and a sculpting class into the same day, either. Or the same month, for that matter. What does resonate is the part about being "wonder women," because I remember so well thinking then, as most of my friends did, "I'm going to have it all." I even remember writing an essay about it to get into graduate school, and whether or not it was based on the weakness of my argument, I was turned down. As time passed, but still before I had children, the phrase shifted to being, "You can't have it all at once, but you can still have it," and I thought that made a lot more sense.

But life has proved both ideals wrong for me and everyone I know--I suspect even for Sarah Palin, who has revived, and become the poster mom for, the debate. In the first case, if you have a fulfilling career, a wonderful husband, well-adjusted, well-groomed children, and Chicken Marbella on the table when you come home at night, chances are great that you are weighed down by the guilt of feeling that you're not spending enough time with your kids, who, it turns out, grow up fast and do not become well-adjusted and well-groomed on their own. In the second case, if you step out of your career or slow it down to raise your children in a more hands-on fashion, you have the nagging dread that (a) you're missing out on important work and (b) you'll never get back on track. I'm not saying anything new here, I'm just saying the dilemma has never been satisfactorily resolved.

When I told my friend Sarah (the other Sarah, that is) on Sunday that our dinner guest had never heard of The Silver Palate, she joked, "I guess it's not the post-racial era we're living in, it's the post-Palate era." 

So here's my question for the women in what I'm calling the epicurious generation--women who haven't had to make decisions yet about balancing work and family. It doesn't matter if you've never heard of The Silver Palate, but does "having it all" mean anything to you? Is there another paradigm?

Unscrambling the Eggs

I've previously confessed my downhill slide from perfectionism but this is how far toward degradation I've gone. 

Yesterday, Sam had a friend over, and once they had finished the light saber fight that's in the play date rule book for 6-to-8-year-old-boys, their rising boredom threatened to thwart the afternoon. "What if we make brownies?" I asked brightly. 

"I'd rather just skip right to eating them," Sam's friend replied. 

With that, I jumped on my laptop, googled "easy brownies," and was soon melting butter and cocoa powder in a pot on the stove. The kids took turns measuring out the sugar and vanilla and beating the eggs. We were all into it, PLUS, we were going to be rewarded for our labors--handsomely, I thought. I poured the eggs into the pot . . . and realized that I had made a mistake. A big one, unless you happen to be a fan of chocolate scrambled eggs, which I am not. 

The old me would have thrown out the curdled-looking molten chocolate and started over. But the old me did not have three young children watching expectantly. And the me standing over the stove had just used up the last grain of sugar and the only two eggs in the house.  

The new me shoved the pan away from the heat, stirred vigorously, and poured the lumpen mixture into the 9 x 9 pan. After all, Julia Child once exhorted her TV audience: "Remember, you are alone in the kitchen and nobody can see you." Well, at least the kids were too short to see what had happened. 

Thirty-five minutes later, I pulled the not-quite-cooked brownies out of the oven, cut them while they were still hot, put them on plates, and served with a glass of milk and a smile. And you know, even I didn't really notice the eggy bits. 

But it made me wonder, not for the first time: is the key to motherhood--and life, generally--faking it? Is this what Hemingway meant by "grace under pressure?"

HuffPost Said "Yes" to My Post on Saying No

My new post "Notes From a Yes Girl" just went up on HuffPost. Please take a look and please leave a comment--I'd love to know what you think. Thanks to you--and thanks to HuffPost!

Why You Shouldn't Make a Llama Nervous

So Ralph just read my previous post on spitting. He says that ballplayers spit because they get nervous. "If you watch them," he said, "they start to pace. It's very animalistic."

"Dogs don't spit," I said, looking at Mavis.

"Yeah," he said, "but llamas do."

You May Find Portions of This Offensive

You know how when you're thinking about buying a new car and suddenly start to notice the make of every car that's parked on the street? Or how when you're hoping to get pregnant and all you see are babies everywhere? 

This is not that. 

The other night, when I stayed up late with Sam to watch one of the playoff games between the Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays, every time the camera panned to another player or coach, he was spitting. It was like a contagion. Except it was behavior as usual. Just in case you don't get the full picture of what I'm talking about, Terry Francona, the manager of the Sox, took a sip of something from a cup--Gatorade, Sam said--and then he spit it out. 

"Why'd he do that?" I asked Sam.

Sam: "He's rinsing his mouth out."

Me (to myself): Isn't that what the bathroom sink of for?

I chew gum, drink drinks, play catch, but do I ever spit? NO! And it's not just ballplayers who do it--it's men! I can honestly say that unless a woman is trying to expel an errant insect that flew into her mouth, I have never seen the fairer sex spit. 

Maybe dads take their sons aside and tell them that spitting is a good idea, but then why does the mom message, Don't do it!, hold no sway? 

So here's my question: WHY DO MEN THINK SPITTING IS A MUST?

I'm Not Company; I Live Here

Last night, I was reading The Trumpet of the Swan (about a swan who, like another famous trumpeter, is named Louis) to Sam and Julia, and it said that with so much stuff hanging around his neck--a trumpet, a chalk board and chalk pencil, a bag for his money, and a Lifesaving medal--Louis felt like a hippie. In the same chapter, a little boy commented, "That's groovy" (all this is from memory because the book has gone off to school for the day). I thought, How do I explain "hippie" and "groovy" to a six- and three-year-old who have never heard "Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In," let alone have a context for it. Fortunately, it was late, they didn't ask, and I was spared. Besides, I thought, That pile of necklaces seems more Coco Chanel than Jerry Garcia to me.

But the idea of hippies popped into my head again this morning when I read a recent post on the blog Woulda Coulda Shoulda about a visit from the grandparents: 

If you'd asked me before they got here what my favorite part of these visits is, I would've responded without hesitation that it's watching my parents interact with my kids . . . This morning, though, I realized that there's another thing I absolutely love on these trips: Having coffee and grown-up chat in the morning.

Woulda Coulda is written by a mom of two named Mir, and I believe she's right on both counts. Wearing a pink cashmere sweater from J. Crew today, I also look far more Coco than Jerry, too. But I firmly believe that apart from Haight-Ashbury and a few other pockets of hippiedom in the 1960s, communes were a brilliant idea that never got off the ground as they should have. When my sister Betsy was making a transition away from Atlanta to live in this part of the country a couple of years ago, she stayed with us for nearly two years; before that, we spent six weeks with our friends Katy and Steve while I was pregnant and our house was being sanded and painted. 

As with everything, there's a downside to communal living: you have to be highly strategic about when you walk around in your underwear or less. But overall, those experiences taught me that a woman should always have another woman in the house to take pressure off the marriage. Imagine how sparing your husband the question, "Honey, do these shoes look OK with this skirt?" would lift the relationship. (I hasten to add that having recently seen the movie The Duchess, in which Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire and ancestor to Diana, was forced to dine at the same table each day with her husband and his mistress and to hear their love-making, I'm talking here about a strictly platonic arrangement.) Betsy and I have put on our makeup side-by-side in front of a mirror since she was 17 and I was 14, she telling me I look better and vice versa. Who among us can't use that kind of boost in the morning, before the run to Starbucks?

Besides allowing for mutual admiration, the set up provides for instant community, including a wider audience for our children's moment-to-moment triumphs and tribulations. It's amazing to watch Betsy with Sam and Julia knowing that her love for them is only infinitesimally less intense than Ralph's and mine--if it's different at all. 

No matter what your age, everybody needs the kind of safety net that a long-ago acquaintance described as a "take-me-to-the-hospital-if-I'm-sick-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-feed-me-

J-ello" kind of friend. Besides the need for food, shelter, and the money to pay for both, feeling that you're not alone in this big world is perhaps our most elemental need. And perhaps that's why Sam asks every day, "Who else is coming for dinner?"

If I remember correctly, even though Louis the Swan gained fame as a trumpet player and stayed in a fancy room at the Ritz in Boston, what he craved most was to be in the company of his family and the other swans back on Upper Red Rock Lake in Montana.

There's Always This Year

There was never a Curse of the Bambino for Sam. He fell in love with baseball one hot afternoon at Camden Yard when he was 19 months old, and even though we live in Washington, Sam and the Red Sox were a natural fit. We listened to games on the radio up on Cape Cod that summer. We joked with Sox fans standing in line at Moby Dick's for lobster. Sam had long, golden-brown curls back then. Johnny Damon had long brown locks back then. (Unlike Damon, Sam did not--and promises he never will--cut his toenails on national TV.) By the time Sam had been a fan for four months, the Red Sox captured their first World Series title in 86 years.

Sam comes from baseball stock. His dad is a Yankees fan. I ardently followed the Atlanta Braves in the years when Hank Aaron was chasing Babe Ruth's home run record. But Sam came to the game on his own, and even when he was tiny, it was his portal on the world. He picked up geography by reciting the city where each team played; he learned his colors (at least red, white, and blue) based on the uniforms; he was introduced to math by the daily box scores in the newspaper. Still, for him, those gray months between November and March, when baseball is just a memory, were dreary. Shuffling and re-shuffling through stacks of baseball cards (most of which were mine from the 1970s), Sam reminded me of a gardener gazing at pictures in a seed catalog. At least when you're older, you know that spring will come again. 

Baseball, of course, did return, and with each new season, Sam drew the rest of the family in a little more. The Nationals came to D.C. and we bought tickets. We started going to the Cape a little earlier so we could take in Cape League baseball. 

This past summer, on the Cape, we went to a whole, new level. Ralph, the hardened Yankee fan, who used to go to games with his father, began to cheer on the Sox. We drove into Boston to see an As-Sox game at Fenway. We turned over a portion of each evening to the Sox on TV. Mornings brought a re-broadcast of the highlights, which, naturally, Sam watched. We played games in the yard and catch on the beach. 

One morning, not long after daybreak, when Sam and I took our puppy to the beach to play, we ran into a fellow dog owner and Red Sox fan who began quizzing Sam on the previous night's game. I stood by as they chatted about who got picked off on first (what's a pick off, I wondered) and discussed the merits of the new pitcher from Cleveland. That's when I realized that although I have 42 years on Sam, he has a deeper knowledge of baseball than I'll ever have and an ability to see the whole field at once, which I can't do. It must come from playing, watching, or dreaming about baseball all the time.

You'd think that his single-mindedness where the Red Sox are concerned would make Sam despondent over their loss last night to the Rays. But strangely he's not. Maybe as baseball is his conduit to the world the Red Sox are merely his conduit to the game. Maybe it's because we've Tivoed enough Sox games to see Sam through the winter. Or maybe it's because a good season is good enough. And in Sam's experience, there really is a future tense where the Red Sox are concerned.

 

The Stuff of Life

Please read what Washington-area food stylist and writer Lisa Cherkasky has to say about family on her excellent blog, Lunch Encounter, about sandwiches and life. Thanks for the shout out, Lisa!

My Advice for John McCain Picked Up by HuffPost

HuffPost picked up my latest submission on John McCain's condescending language. The gist is that he should avoid phrases like "I'm proud of her" when referring to Sarah Palin and to stop calling us "my friends!"

Please take a look, and please leave a comment. It will help me as I try to make a go of life as a blogger.

Thanks so much, HuffPost! 

A Change in the World as We Know It

I'm always fascinated by signs of the times, so it was with great interest that I read a piece in yesterday's New York Times reporting that a growing number of Americans are turning to the tap for their drinking water. This back-to-the-future move, a result of consumers' efforts to cut costs and become better environmental stewards, has so affected PepsiCo's profits, that the company announced thousands of lay-offs. Is this what's meant by trickle-down economics now that we live in the post bailout world? The same day the Environmental Working Group issued a report citing contaminants in 10 brands of bottled water. So much for paying for quality.

Even this morning, as Sam and I talked over what snacks to take his class when it's our turn next week, he reminded me: "No juice, Mom. We drink water from the fountain."

I'm not a huge fan of what flows out of Washington's taps--it has too much of a chlorine aftertaste for me. And at our last house, the lead level in the water was so high that it caught Sam's pediatrician's notice well before revelations surfaced about lead pipes in several of the District's neighborhoods, including ours. 

Nonetheless I can happily imagine an evening when Ralph and I go out to dinner and our waiter assumes that we'd like regular water rather than offering us a range of slickly bottled choices in reverential tones usually reserved for the most expensive wines. 

Maybe I crave this simplicity because I grew up in Atlanta, where Coca-Cola was also born. In my world, Coke was the generic term for soda just as Kleenex stands for tissue and Xerox for photocopying. The polite host would invariably offer you a "Coke" if you dropped by, by which he or she meant anything non-alcoholic to drink, including, I believe, water. You could answer something like, "That'd be great! I'd love some ginger-ale."

At the World of Coca-Cola, yet another marketing tool for the company's soft drinks, this one slightly disguised as a museum, a number of the exhibits suggest that Coke was at least partly responsible for many of the gains our society has made in the past century, including such landmarks as civil rights. At the end of your "tour," you have the opportunity to hold out a cup into which the bubbly soda sprays from a fountain. I didn't know whether to be disgusted or delighted, but I put my cynicism aside and drank the hypothetical Kool-aid.

The only other time I've seen anything like that was when Ralph and I went to the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Ken., several years ago. After the horses ran and we had the requisite experience of losing at the betting window, we went to a party thrown at the home of a local whiskey scion. On the wide back lawn they had set up a white-cloth-draped table on top of which sat a sterling-silver fountain of cascading mint juleps. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet people would use fewer plastic water bottles if that's what came out of their kitchen tap.  

 

Mom Wars Need a Cease Fire

Each time I hear the morning traffic report, I thank the real-estate gods that I wound up living in the middle of Washington, D.C., and don't have to navigate what's known locally as the Mixing Bowl, one of the country's most heavily congested crossroads and a gantlet required of thousands who commute into town each day from the surrounding suburbs. What's especially baffling to me are those people who have chosen to own a mega-square-foot, high-ceilinged McMansion but then, because they're so far away from EVERYTHING, wind up living in their car. It might be a really nice, luxury SUV, but it's still a car. They eat there. They email there. They raise their kids there. And last week Sam noticed a driver shaving, a spectacle that he, at 6, pronounced "pathetic." But even living a few walkable blocks from the Metro, I could relate to this post on Burbia.com called "Mommy Wars Redux: How Simone De Beauvior Rescued Me in the Suburbs," by a friend of a friend named Delia Lloyd. 

Lloyd, who lives in London, writes that the dichotomy is not so much between women who work and those who don't but rather between those two types she dubs "Prissy mom" and "earthy-crunchy mom."

One of my favorite parts is this:

"I'm not nearly put together enough for the Women's Club set (my tennis game could easily qualify me for Special Needs). Nor do I fit in with the wholesome crowd (when asked to draw my ideal birth scene in my La Maze class, I drew an epidural)." 

She could be describing me. But actually, I see the mom kingdom (queendom?) divided slightly differently into those who pack a napkin in their child's lunch, those who forget the napkin, and those who forget everything and rely on the stuff that passes for food in the school cafeteria (i.e., hyper-organized, moderately organized, and a mess). Needless to say, I fall into the latter category, and I can add that I also forget to pay for the school lunches most of thetime.

But however you categorize us, we can be pretty nasty to each other--and equally hard on ourselves, like my friend in Atlanta who says she feels constant pressure to participate more in her kids' school activities but between three children and a sick father, she's maxed out. Last year when I was Sam's room parent, I could see the guilt and relief on the other parents' faces that someone else was making the royal icing for gingerbread houses, collecting money for teacher gifts, or arranging chaperones for a field trip. I recognized the look from how I felt the year before.

Who hasn't had an eyebrow raised about her deadbeat behavior by a fellow mom or raised her own harried brow? But I say that we should stop comparing ourselves to the overachievers; in fact, let's stop comparing ourselves altogether. "What's important,"says Lloyd, "is to engage with the world in ways that matter to you, regardless of what the others are saying or doing." Mothering, after all, is not meant to be a blood sport.  

"Taking the Long Way": Take 2

When I told my father a couple of weeks ago that I was planning to go to my 30th high school reunion, he asked me why. Always a succinct and insightful man, he had put his pinky on the right question. And though he's also kind enough to say, "That makes sense" when I answered, "I think I'll have a horrible time, but I'll regret it if I don't go," my response did not persuade even me that this was a good idea. At the least I thought an appearance, however brief, would yield rich anecdotes, much like a bad blind date--the difference being that this promised to be a bad date in a hall of mirrors.

Here's the back story: When I transferred to The Lovett School in eighth grade where many of my classmates had gone since kindergarten, I was a social misfit. My above-the-collar haircut was short enough to be regulation--for the boys. I was petrified of the opposite sex. The school I had gone to before was so poor academically that I was two years behind in almost every subject. Hell, I even said the Lord's Prayer with the wrong ending given that I had come from the Christ the King, a Catholic school where I was the only Jew, before I went Episcopalian. And while I caught up academically, that only widened the gap in my popularity. I spent Saturday nights writing English papers with my grandmother. I hoped that underneath my nerdly exterior there was a normal person, and I couldn't wait to get out of that suffocating environment to find out. The last time I was on the Lovett campus, Jimmy Carter was president and the No. 1 hit single was "Shadow Dancing" by Andy Gibb (the Bee Gees' "Night Fever" was No. 2).

To say that Lovett did not "light up my life" (that year's No. 3 hit by Debby Boone) is a tremendous understatement. When I thought about the upcoming reunion, my mind kept replaying that Dixie Chicks' song "The Long Way Around" about bucking the system while everyone else stays in the same zip code where their parents live. I haven't lived in Atlanta since I went off to college. But 30 years is a long time. So having had a conversation with myself that I would just find the people who had been my friends back in the day and not bother with the others, I went . . . and had the best time! One of my favorite conversations was with the class of '78's football star, a guy--now a man--with whom I had never before exchanged a vowel. Never mind that as one of my friends emailed me today, XX "used to have PROMINENT hair" and now he is bald. What stood out for me was his kindness. There was my friend Clare, who I also haven't seen in three decades. She was wearing the same wry expression and the same Oxford cloth shirt that I left her in. And there was the woman who said I seemed really comfortable with myself. To my surprise, there are some moments when I think she might be right.

There are a lot of downsides to aging, but, depending on where you start out, I think you either gain confidence (me) or humility (nearly everyone else in my class). Miraculously it seems that the see-saw balances. 

Just in the past couple of years I've wondered how one can arrive in middle-age and still make the same mistakes. My mistake this time was to assume the worst when, in reality, we were just a tiny band of well-wishers that gathered in a lush backyard a block from my parents' house, listened to Earth, Wind and Fire, leafed through the high-school yearbook, and went home at 11:00 p.m.

A Little Pick-Me-Up from HuffPost: Town Hall Debate

The Huffington Post picked up my second submission last week. Check it out: 

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-kulman/one-man-will-win-the-pres_b_132938.html

Please tell your friends. Just don't tell my mother!

After the Greed Is Gone

My friend David R. Anderson, the rector of St. Luke's Parish in Darien, Conn., was quoted in a New York Times piece yesterday about how recent events on Wall Street are affecting "the community said to have the nation's highest percentage of residents working in financial industries." David said:

"We're all greedy. If you can acknowledge that in yourself, you can make some progress. If you want to find someone else to blame, you're probably not going to make much progress yourself."

David's eloquence aside, most of us measure progress not in how accepting we are of our sins but in terms of the money we make and how many houses, cars, private school educations, etc. we can pay for along the way. We've aimed for nobility a few times. Remember after 9/11 when we were ready to sacrifice for our country and in a move that was more Zsa Zsa Gabor than Greatest Generation, the president instead implored us to shop? 

Over the past several years it hasn't just been Congress and the White House that have encouraged us to spend. Somewhere along the way Wall Street allowed crucial social compacts to be broken and truisms like you can't get something for nothing and if something seems too good to be true, it probably is to be ignored. It used to be that if after due diligence, mortgage lenders thought a prospective borrower wasn’t up to a loan, they said no. They didn't say, We’ll look the other way while you take on more debt than you could possibly repay. Some of these borrowers should have known better. But who could blame them--us--for trying when housing seemed to be a foolproof investment, providing us with even more of those things we were hell-bent on acquiring? 

Over the past few weeks and months, we've moved from greed to something else though what, exactly, it's too soon to say. One clue is that the president went on national TV recently and instead of addressing us as consumers he spoke to us as "taxpayers," asking Americans to spare some of our "hard-earned money" for Wall Street. In my small way at home (which we bought in 2005, just before the market crested), I'm on a new kick to make do with what we have. We have too much. It was a telling moment when I threw away three contractor bags full of puzzles and games missing too many pieces to salvage and my children didn't notice that a single toy was gone. Yesterday Sam went to a fellow 6-year-old's birthday party not with the customary Star Wars Lego set but a gift certificate for a Kiva micro-loan so that a farmer in Nicaragua can buy a pig. Sam and Julia will probably have a lot to say about how weird their mom and dad are when they get a little older. And the pig farmer is just the start.

Please Stop Distracting Me, I'm Trying to Read

Back in the pre-convention calm of August, I sat on the beach on Cape Cod, my head buried not just in sand but in a suitcase-size volume* of War and Peace. Since Labor Day Tolstoy's fictional account of 19th-century Russia, though a soap opera the likes of which HBO has never approximated, has not captivated me nearly as much as the daily--and sometimes, hourly--news. Between the presidential race and what's happening on Wall Street and Capitol Hill there's no doubt that we live in an eye-popping time. And whether or not there really is an ancient Chinese proverb to that effect, it feels like we're under a curse.

So cursed, in fact, that watching the presidential debate last week--you know, the pedantic one that felt like we were back in Al Gore's graduate class, An Inconvenient Truth--I couldn't help but wonder why anyone would want to be president right now. Between the country's money troubles, the energy crisis, our involvement in two wars, and whether or not we should talk to Iran with or without preconditions--we've made a mess of things. God bless McCain and Obama--those candidates with egos the size of California and Texas put together--is all I have to say. Someone has to have K-P duty. 

In a month this race that will have lasted 658 days will be over (unless we again find ourselves wrangling over hanging chads) and perhaps the national sport of watching Sarah Palin being interviewed by Katie Couric or otherwise proving Tina Fey to be the more prepared candidate will be over (and perhaps not). I will turn away from the 2008 version of the femme fatale that has so obsessed my friends and me (one even declared herself a member of the wholly fictitious Palin Anonymous just so she could stop watching YouTube and get on with her work) and go back to reading about Tolstoy's femme fatale, Natasha Rostov. 

But I think I won't be as wholly absorbed in my novel as before. I can't recall a single president who's had a calamity-free term so maybe we'll come out of the fix we're in just fine. I can't help but believe, though, that it's going to take all of us this time. If we'd just been paying more attention when promises like "shock and awe" and "Wall Street can regulate itself" were made, we wouldn't find ourselves living in times that are quite so riveting. 

  *Additional baggage charges may apply