New PD Post - Washington Not Having Food Fights But Fighting Bad Food

I snuck out of a forum on education featuring Education Secretary Arne Duncan today to go to a talk given by New York Times Minimalist columnist Mark Bittman and Washington-based chef Jose Andres about eating better to save not just ourselves but also the planet. It pretty much goes without saying that I wrote a PD post on the food panel ahead of anything I might write later on Duncan (who was compelling) and the allocation of resources in education. In my short life as an education reporter, I have come to understand that most of the statistics are not rosy. And if a nation moves on its belly, as Napolean said, there's no reason why a blogger shouldn't, too. 

The events were put on by the Center for American Progress, and the best part was that Ralph was also working at both, so whenever I got tired of trying to focus my new progressive eyeglasses on the words, "Center for American Progress," I would watch him take pictures. Afterward, he took me to lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, Black Salt. 

I'm pleased to say that after listening to Bittman urge the audience to eat less meat, I ordered a crab cake. But I realize that that's only a partial victory, because, as the head of P.R. for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) once told me when I interviewed him for U.S.News, "Fish are not swimming vegetables." 

Next time, I guess it's seaweed salad for me.

Parenting Advice from Goldie Hawn

Speaking of teachable moments, I'm not one to think that Hollywood stars are the best source of parenting advice. But I told a friend who has worked with a lot of actors that I thought Goldie Hawn, whom I interviewed last week for a PD story on a mindfulness program she started in schools, was wise. She said that she kept running into smart ones--Hawn, Meg Ryan, and someone I can't remember--and marveling, until finally she realized that just because they can act doesn't mean they can't think. Point taken.

I caught up with Hawn on a particularly vulnerable parenting day in our house. After what we thought was incredibly bad behavior on Sam's part, we gave him the maximum sentence: we forbade him from playing in that day's T-ball game--a double-whammy, since (1) Ralph is his coach and (2) Sam's dedication to baseball and the Muckdogs, his team, surpasses his dedication to God and country. But that morning he had grabbed a ball away from Julia, and, when called on it, he walked away, down the hill by himself to school. When Ralph caught up with him, Sam rounded out the episode by hitting his dad. 

When I asked Hawn what she'd learned as a mother, she said:

"If I have the intention to be happy as a mother, then my zest is rubbed off on the children. Being a joyful parent is actually choosing your battles. Be the best of you, and don't let them get the best of you."

She went on to say that getting angry should mean something:

"I would get angry if they weren't kind. If they lied, that was a felony. If they cursed in the house."

After that, I felt better about punishing Sam so strongly. It didn't keep him from misbehaving the next day, or the day after that, but I've come to believe that much of parenting is about conditioning your child so that small mistakes don't become nasty habits and good habits, like doing your homework and sitting down to dinner every night with your family, take root. But the process of parenting--well, that's more about educating me than him. 

Economics 101: Learning in Life What I Didn't Learn in College

The only reason I did well in Econ in college is that I took the courses with my friend, Bill, who had a mind for all the charts and graphs about guns and butter that I lacked, and he was generous enough to pull me along. 

But even as I've tried to deny the daily damage being inflicted on my retirement account--I've been tossing the unopened statements in the trash for the past several months--the economy has risen to become THE conversation. It pops up in headlines in the daily papers and on my phone. It comes up on walks and over dinner with friends and even during Ralph's and my pillow-talk time at night. We who have Greatest Generation envy are finally to be tested, it seems, by the Great Recession. 

Since history never repeats itself precisely, however, I find myself obsessing about what form the paradigm shifts our lives will take. About the only change I've made so far is to stop acquiring and start whittling: I've made a deal with myself that for every day I don't go to Starbucks, I transfer $5 toward my credit card balance (Last week when I was in bed with the flu and only craved tea, I "made" a whopping $35!) 

This nonetheless represents a big change for me. I have lived my entire adult life by an approach that Calvin Trillin calls "Alice's Law of Compensatory Cash Flow." That's the principal by which if you think you absolutely must buy a fabulous new flat screen TV that cost $5,000 but then remember that if you do there will be no money to pay the mortgage, feed the kids, or train the dog and so you forego it, you have in effect "saved" $5,000 that you can then spend on something else. 

But surely this is only the first of many adjustments, small and large. If few can afford to send their kids to college in the manner to which we upper-middle-class aspirers have planned, will the Harvards and Yales somehow become devalued, replaced by windshield stickers for Georgia State? Will we be blown back a generation, so that we raise our kids the way our parents grew up--living with multi-generations? taking in boarders? We will we start mending the clothes we buy from Target? Will we never be able to retire?

All of this is still in the realm of fantasy right now, and I hope that's where it stays. But in my imagination, what I picture from the turmoil we're in is a more communal life, with greater reliance on and interdependence among friends, family, and neighbors, less waste, and more of a focus on what we really care about because choices have to be made. 

I'd love to hear how the economy has affected you, and where you think we're headed?

Food and the Unintended Consequences of Parenting

When Sam was a toddler, someone told us that the way to cure bad behavior was to put a drop of Tabasco on his tongue. But just at the moment Ralph finally decided to reach for the small bottle with the kick-ass contents, he decided there must be a better way to teach baby Sam a lesson than to mess with his taste buds. He closed the kitchen cabinet, forever leaving Tabasco as a condiment for raw oysters rather than a form of corporal punishment.  

I was thinking about that incident yesterday when I read a story in the New York Times about well-meaning parents who have passed on their obsession with health food to the detriment of their kids. Without meaning to, they have doused the equivalent of Tabasco all over what their children eat:

"We're seeing a lot of anxiety in these kids," said Cynthia Bulik, the director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "They go to birthday parties, and if it's not a granola cake they feel like they can't eat it. The culture has led both them and their parents to take the public health messages to an extreme." 

The piece goes on:

 "Lisa Dorfman, a registered dietician . . .  says that she often sees children who are terrified of foods that are deemed 'bad' by their parents. "It's almost a fear of dying, a fear of illness, like a delusional view of foods in general," she said. "I see kids whose parents have hypnotized them. I have 5-year-olds that speak like 40-year-olds. They can't eat an Oreo cookie without being concerned about trans fats." 

Like most things having to do with parenting, the lessons you teach about food are not as straightforward as you'd wish. Even though there seems to be considerable distance between obesity and eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, we're just talking about a difference of pounds in terms of the trouble they bring. One doctor has coined the name "orthorexia" for people obsessed with health-conscious eating, the Times says. What we're trying to do, of course, is lay down patterns that will serve our kids well as they grow up and make their own decisions. But how? In terms of sweets, we swing between operating a Hitler youth camp and Candy Land.

In our house, food is not just what we eat, it's what we do. In first grade this year, when he was asked to write his autobiography, "What activity does your family enjoy together," saying, "We cook." As much as it slows dinner prep down, Sam and Julia snap beans (Julia often throws away the beans and puts the snapped ends in the bowl) and cut vegetables with a dull, ivory-handled fish knife. Each time Ralph picks Sam up from school, his first question is always, "Who's coming for dinner?" (When I pick him up, he asks, "Where are we going for dinner?")

It occurred to me in thinking about all this that maybe putting food in the context of family meals rather than talking about the sugar content in a box of Puffins, say, is the way to go. The people I know who have raised successful children put great stock in the family dinner as if some alchemy happens when you sit around a table together. And certainly in my own experience growing up, the profound lessons of my childhood were delivered not from a podium but from behind a place mat. Now that my father is on a feeding tube, those kitchen table lessons seem all the more poignant to me.

Only time will tell whether the right lessons take with Sam and Julia. When I was young, my parents forbade us from going to McDonald's and listening to the Beatles (Burger King and "Winchester Cathedral" were their fast-food and music of choice.) 

All of parenting seems arbitrary, fraught with unintended consequences. My parents were prescient about McDonald's (though not Burger King). As for the Beatles, well, maybe we'll learn one day that they're hazardous to your health.

The End of Journalism--and Civilization

While I'm on the subject of caregivers (see yesterday's post), I'd like to rant for a moment about journalism. I didn't get to see Barack Obama's State of the Union address last night--I was too busy putting Julia to bed again and again, she having decided that she would stay up until Ralph got home at 11 p.m. 

Nonetheless, I'm almost certain from reading today's papers that while the president talked about Wall Street and the Big Three in Detroit, he failed to mention the demise of journalism. We are small potatoes compared to other industries, and we will never get a bail-out. But we are dying all the same. On Monday, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News declared bankruptcy. They join the Seattle-Post Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News, which are for sale, and scores of other papers and magazines that have had lay-offs and/or involuntary furloughs. The Christian Science Monitor, of course, has already moved its operations to the Web. Ditto with U.S. News & World Report, where I used to work, which now puts out a magazine only once a month.

But it's not just a question of where we will read our news: we can all get used to reading the newspaper on a computer. It's what will be lost in the translation. I have one very good friend who's a devotee of the obituaries in the local paper, not because she's morose but because of the tidbits of humanity they reveal about the people who died. 

That's exactly what I've been thinking about that New York Times piece on child caregivers that I cited yesterday. If I were reading the paper online, I would scan the headlines about the economy and Iraq and Afghanistan and probably not take the time to read anything I don't have to. And having read the caregiving story, it's not as if I--or anyone else--can do anything to change the grim circumstances it lays out. Those kids will go on giving up their lives for their parents whether it becomes public knowledge or not. 

But journalism is about more than headlines; it's about more than keeping the government honest or being the whistle-blowers for big business. Its equally important role is to hold up a mirror to society; to tell us who we are. It's about the texture of our daily lives.

Few, besides my fellow journalists, seem to think that much will be lost by losing this. Journalists are reviled--lower, I'd bet, than lawyers on the food chain. Sarah Palin spoke for many Americans when she said during the campaign and afterward that we got in the way of telling the story.

But I can't help but think that what's being lost is of larger moment than a Saturn minivan, say. I think it's more a cornerstone of civilization that is crumbling.  

Intensivist Care

In the intermediate intensive care unit of the hospital in Atlanta where my dad is, there's a doctor on call 24/7 known as an intensivist. But I've decided that whether we deal with sick people or not, we're all intensivists. Think about it: when's the last time you went at a project in a relaxed way? Did anything at a leisurely pace? Took something lightly?

When I landed in Washington after an emotional week spent at my dad's bedside, I was, for the briefest time, Sam and Julia's fantasy mom. They were happy to see me and clung to me in baggage claim, full of news about what they'd been doing in my absence: a birthday party at a real fire house, a dinner date with their friend Benjamin and his parents, ballet class that ended with Julia's getting bear stamps on her hands (still visible), breakfast with Ralph, including hot chocolate with extra whipped cream. Time slowed while I took in the sight and substance of my beautiful, healthy family.

It didn't take more than about 1 1/2 hours, though, before I was back in intensivist mode, which is to say back in the trenches of mom-dom. Sam hadn't done his homework while I was away and wasn't in the mood to hear that he still had to, late or not. A skirmish ensued. But the truth is, life has moved on, because there's this week's homework to attend to. Last week is over.

The intensity at which we live is not just about parenting. A friend who is writing a book and trying to finish said she worked so hard yesterday that she didn't have time to eat until she looked up from her computer and it was dinner-time. Why do I do this to myself, she opined. Why do I wait until the last minute?

But we all do. The way our full lives are organized--or disorganized--we can't help but do things on deadline. As one of my sisters said recently, our lives are so based on a 24/7 time clock, we don't ask what day something is due anymore, we ask what time. She was referring to her son, who punched the send button on a college application related something at 11:59 p.m. before it had to be in at midnight.

And even though I bought Valentine's Day cards at the CVS across the street from the hospital days ago in an effort to relieve the tedium of the waiting room, it's not like I also mailed them in advance. No, I will scramble to do that today so that they'll arrive on Feb. 14, if the postal service cooperates. It's not the first instance I've been late. I have solved my latent tardiness before by spending $48 at FedEx on a $2.49 father's day card.

All this rushing makes it hard to stop and put things in context. To enjoy. It wasn't until I was looking at photos of Sam and Julia at my mom and dad's house last week and saw one of Julia at 1, standing diaper-less and defiant in her patent-leather party shoes in the front yard, that I realized I don't even remember that moment--don't remember Julia at 1--which was just 2 years ago. It had the effect of slamming on my interior brakes, just briefly, to luxuriate in the fact that I have a still-small child--in fact, two--to swaddle myself in. And then I had to turn my attention elsewhere.

I'm not sure there's a solution. I'm just musing--intensively. 

Getting By With a Lot of Help From Our Friends

Ralph and I (and Sam and Julia) are incredibly fortunate to have such great friends. On Monday when I had to fly to Atlanta unexpectedly and without telling S and J, and Ralph had to work, our next-of-kin, Katy Kelly, subbed for us. Here's a report that made me laugh. Maybe it will amuse you, too. (Pop is my dad, who probably hasn't eaten a Dunkin Donut in 38 years--if ever.)

"Sam and Julia were excellento. I picked up Sam about 5:15. We got Julia. Drove home. Walked to Arucola for supper. Came back. Took a bath. Julia got a princess hairdo. Made Valentines. Julia made one for Pop. There are many letters on it. Mostly Ps and Bs and Os. She says it says Dunkin Donuts. Perhaps it is a coupon. She says he likes them. Ralph came. Helped Steve re-hang the Fap Anis picture (LR got painted today). Lost socks. Meltdown. Found socks. Home."

Tuesday Night Fever

Washington, as anyone over the age of 16 minutes can sense, is suffering from a collective anxiety these days. You'd think that our nervousness might be over the deficit that's 12 zeroes long or the full-out war in the Gaza Strip, and of course good people are fretting over both. But neither the debate over the economic stimulus nor the need for a cease fire in the Middle East is the No. 1 preoccupation in town.

At the moment Washington is not about politics with a capital P but rather a form of office politics, the central question being how far away your personal planet is from the center of the solar system--a.k.a. the president. This distance determines not just your career but also your social life, where your kids go to school, and soon, I'm sure, which rescue league your dog comes from. 

All this is to say that whether you're a Bush person or an Obama person, what you're most likely thinking about right now is how best to position yourself. After all, what Republican wants to be the one to turn out the lights as the Bushes decamp for Texas? And what Democrat wants to be left behind at the non-profit that's been a holding tank for the past eight years when there's an actual country to run instead of merely to theorize about? The anxiety is so high among some of these government wannabees that they need a stunt double* to perform the extreme and, in a few cases, extremely embarrassing, maneuvers they're trying to secure a job in the new administration. There's also a secondary mania over snagging a ticket (or two, because who really wants to go alone?) to the inauguration itself. 

Our family is so outside the outer loop of the Beltway that we're just thinking about the same things we always dwell on: what garbage bag, doll's head, potpourri pouch, Star Wars Lego has Mavis chewed up and has she peed and/or pooped in Sam or Julia's room or simply thrown up?

Still, we're all excited about January 20th, when we may get to see the 44th president sworn-in on a Jumbo-tron somewhere down on the Mall--or, more likely, on a little TV in the warmth of the Five Guys Burgers and Fries at DuPont Circle if walking to the Mall turns out to be more Sissyphean than pleasurable. (The we here means my sister, Betsy, not Ralph, who's working.)

But come Inauguration Night, hey, we're (Betsy and me again) grabbing the sequined ring and going to a ball! It's being thrown by a friend of ours, and we're dressing up to go spend an evening in high heels with our closest buddies. It might not be celebrity-studded, but it will definitely be fun. 

"It's a lesser ball," I've told those who're interested. "Truthfully," I say, "it's probably your least ball." At least that's what I thought until I was set straight today by a friend, who explained that a ball is an official event, meaning that's it's being hosted by Barack Obama or Joe Biden, while a gala is an unofficial one. 

"In that case, I guess that makes my event a gala," I said. "

"Your event is nothing," she answered.

I'm not sure, but I think what she was saying was that if I were a planet, I'd be Pluto. And yes, I think she knows that Pluto has been demoted.

*My niece recently told Sam and Julia that actors use stunt doubles for kissing in movies because, you know, they might otherwise get germs--or they might already be married.

Revenge--Even Hypothetical--Is the Best Medicine

Even though the bra-burning part of the 1960s turns out to be a myth, suffice it to say that the modern women's movement happened a long time ago, long enough, it seemed to me yesterday, that I was surprised to be treated like a woman who didn't know a nut from a bolt when I dropped off my car at the VW dealership for its 30,000-mile check-up. I shouldn't have been particularly surprised because ours is still a sexist society, starting with the way journalists sometimes wrote about Hillary Clinton during her campaign to become the Democratic presidential nominee. I mean would Mr. Hillary Clinton ever have been described in newspapers as "shrill"?

The car experience was still galling me today when I went to the doctor for my 30,000-mile check-up. Why I told my GP that in Ralph's absence Sam carried my purse onto the plane when we flew to Atlanta for the holidays to free up my arms for Julia and two carry-ons, I'm not sure. But he easily topped my story by revealing that he was 1 of 20 kids in his family and that his 5' 3" mother, who was just as formidable as she was short, called each of her 13 boys "HITs," or husbands in training. She insisted that each one learn to cook, iron, and sew. On top of that, his seven older sisters trained their baby bro to buy their tampons, right down to the embarrassing price check screamed from the back of the store to the front. It made me realize that I have a lot of fundamentals to teach Sam before he gets sucked into some kind of macho force field. (After all, at six, he still kisses his mama goodbye in public.) 

But more than that, my doc inadvertently gave me just the right salve for my anger. I can take the car somewhere else for repairs, of course, but it won't ever satisfy me as much as imagining my Martens' VW man standing in line at the CVS with an armload of tampons, waiting for a price check.

Ring in the Old

As usual, the start of the new year was accompanied by a look back, including an entertaining interview with the Bush twins in People, on Malia and Sasha Obama. But one wrap-up that utterly baffled me was the In/Out List published last week by the Washington Post. It's not only that I hadn't heard of most of the things on the "in" list, I was also clueless about most of the "out" list, proving that I'm not just out, I'm out in the standing room section of the upper bleachers. I mean "LOLcats"? "Competitive cup-stacking"? "Gourmet Toast"? "Emphasizing. Things. With. Periods."? Please. The bafflement goes on. And on.

Just when I thought I hadn't been invited to the party at all, along came the ultra-hip SundayStyles section of the New York Times, which made me feel at least somewhat vindicated. For while the Post had declared absinthe--that sickly green liquid that made everyone in Toulouse-Lautrec's day feel so sickly green--soooo last year, the Times had a front-page story on its current popularity:

There are a number of bars in New York City these days that make cocktails with absinthe, mixing it with rum or tequila or gin to, um, complement the taste. A significant portion of them are on the Lower East Side and are the kind of bars that don't have a sign or a listed phone number...

I am declaring a moratorium on in/out lists. It's not just because of my incredible investigative work revealing a Styles war. It's because I'm fatigued by the idea that everything is disposable. It's definitely a lesson that Ralph and I are trying to un-teach Sam and Julia, who, up to now, have had the same toys bought and re-bought for them. And I think we're not alone. Most people I know aren't just thinking three times before spending money, they're also thinking a time or two before throwing anything away that could possibly prove to be useful later on. This includes good ideas. And it extends to the loaf of bread on the top of the fridge, gourmet or not. (Check out the food Web site Loulies, which recently had a post on not wasting food.) 

Recycling extends to fashion, too. The same SundayStyles section, in fact, had a photo feature on pulling one's vintage designer wear out of mothballs. While I don't have a Balenciaga coat hanging in the back of my closet or anything else designer save Isaac Mizrahi for Target, I did rummage through to find a J.Crew cardigan I bought 10 years ago. (Okay, not everything weathers well.)

Along with in/out lists, I'm also putting new year's resolutions on ice. While I'm all for striving to be better, I've come to think that most resolutions aren't so new as they are another example of recycling from last year--or last decade. Lose weight. Check. Get more exercise. Check. Spend more time with the kids. Check. It's just a compilation of all the things that make us feel less than good about ourselves--or even downright guilty. 

Last night when I was flipping through the January issue of Real Simple, I came across a resolution that I could actually buy into. It's "controlling the controllables." And, while they didn't come out and say it, I will: Try not to worry--or feel guilty--about the rest.

Is Happiness the Same as Success or Do We Have to Choose?

I'm in the all-too-typical position of reading two books at once now (three, if count War and Peace, which is frozen on page 364 where I left off at the end of the summer). The first book is Ned Hallowell's CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap; the second is Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. Neither is what I'd call a great read, but I'm slogging through. 

But it didn't occur to me until last night (hair slathered in Cetaphil and covered with a plastic shower cap to "suffocate" those g-d lice is how my friend Sarah put it) how much the books are in opposition to one another. Or are they? 

In CrazyBusy, Hallowell, a former Harvard psychiatrist and ADD expert who Ralph and I recently heard speak, suggests dialing life back a notch or three. In his view, being out-of-control busy has supplanted designer handbags as the new status symbol and the yearning to get organized is just as ubiquitous as the nearly universal desire to shed a few pounds. All it will take, the chronic clutterers among us believe, is the equivalent of the next new diet to clean off our desks and clear out our kids' toy boxes, and come January or June or September, by God, it's going to happen! 

Hallowell's lecture was about the childhood roots of happiness (after his book by the same name), but his theme was much the same as CrazyBusy: don't lose sight of what's important. He stressed to a state-of-the-art private school auditorium full of stressed-out parents that dragging your child from horseback riding to ballet to baseball to math tutoring is not nearly as important as allowing him to find a passion and then letting all the connections that ripple out from that passion grow. I felt calm when I left. Sam loves baseball, and, as I've blogged about before, that obsession has been his window on the world since he was 19 months old. And Julia, I was sure that night, would eventually find something besides dressing up that makes her world spin properly on its axis. 

But Gladwell upset my zen moment. While our national narrative on success is all about pluck and how sturdy one's boot straps are, Gladwell says that success is more a function of luck

--when you're born (January babies are more likely to excel at hockey) and to whom. He describes a study by sociologist Annette Lareau, who found not only that parenting styles were "divided almost perfectly along class lines" but that the overachiever parent tends to produce the most successful kids: 

The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children's free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons.

Reading that was enough to make me want to pull off my Cetaphil-laced shower cap. That's not crazybusy, I thought. That's insane. 

Lareau calls what I think of as Xtreme parenting "concerted cultivation" and believes that the ability to "customize" your environment is one of the big keys to success. 

And so I was left wondering all over again if trips for Sam to play baseball in the Virginia and Pennsylvania suburbs will one day be necessary for his success, not as a ball player necessarily, but as a person. Should he already be taking saxophone lessons? And what about karate? And am I behind by not already signing Julia up for ballet lessons, even though, at this point for her, it's all about the leotard and the pink slippers? Should we be fanning her interest in music not by playing CDs in the car but by attending music appreciation classes? Is our mellow approach stunting our children's growth before they even get started?

I personally don't know a single parent who says, "I just want my child to be successful."  Like Ralph and me, they say, "I just want to be my child to be happy." But do we really believe that our children will be happy as cashiers or waiters or construction workers? Don't we secretly have some floor that we think they should attain in order to be happy, say waiter/struggling artist? Can you be happy without also being successful? Where do those two intertwined notions of success and happiness go their separate ways? Or do they? 

I need a little wisdom here. And a cure for head lice.

Phoning Home--and Elsewhere

I've always thought the expression "phoning it in" was too glib; too coldly technological, but in the past few weeks I've come to see the advantages of telephone as proxy.

That's because I've recently had the opportunity to play the roles of mother, daughter, wife, worker bee, in-law, and aunt both in person and via cell. The morning I arrived in Atlanta a week before Thanksgiving to spend a few days with my parents without the distraction of kids and siblings, my mom had contracted a stomach flu so severe she was lying in the emergency room of the local hospital on a glucose drip. Out went our plans for ladies' lunches and holiday shopping designed to get my mom, my dad's 24/7 caregiver, out of the house. Instead, while she sipped chicken broth or slept, I took over her nursing duties (albeit far less proficiently than she handles them). My dad, who can do little for himself and requires constant care, is nonetheless the essence of courtesy and consideration. His middle-of-the-night requests for a blanket or cough syrup were invariably blanketed in apologies. And despite the circumstances, I loved spending time with him. But as I was trying to get back to sleep after one of those wee-hour wake up calls, I thought, Being a daughter is the hardest job I have right now. 

How could I think otherwise when, during my five days in Atlanta, all I heard from home were cheery phone messages in which Ralph would say, "We love you," followed by a tiny and distant-sounding echo of "We love you" and then an even tinier and more distant voice, "We love you," like so many stair steps. Separated by hundreds of miles and connected only by speaker phone, even Mavis, our not-quite-housebroken hound with a nose for a crumb, began to seem like a contender for best-behaved dog. As a friend of Ralph's and mine whose job keeps him on the road about 250 days a year, says, "The longer I'm away from home, the less my wife and I have to talk about." It's true for us, too. At least I don't recall Ralph's mentioning any suspicions about Sam and head lice over the phone.

Arriving back in Washington, it was a different story. I returned to D.C. sick with the same bug as my mom, but, as bad luck would have it, had to steer Sam into the school nurse's office for a lice check the very next morning, a trip that, as you know from my last post, resulted in a frenzy of washing--hair, clothes, and, just to be safe, Mavis. Meanwhile, the phone was ringing with grateful--and sympathetic--calls from my parents over what I'd just left behind in Atlanta and what had just greeted me here. Feverish, chilled, and wiped out from all those lice, I found myself thinking, Motherhood is the hardest job I have.

You see where I'm going with this. But it's not because I believe that absence makes the heart grow fonder. In fact I think true love is tucking your daughter into her toddler bed, stroking her soft cheek, and whispering into your sleepy girl's ear how much you love her just as she drifts off--all the while wondering if lice lurk in her halo of hair. 

No. We women with aging parents and children who are just getting started, with a job to hold down and a household to run and a husband to stay connected to can't be in two or four places at once--even though I'd like to. The phone just helps you forget momentarily that you're not.

 

Thinking Inside the Bun

"The real source of all growth is human ingenuity..."

I don't usually go around quoting Forbes (nor do I usually read it). But when a recent issue was brought to my attention, I had to take note of the above quotation, because suddenly, as if this economically down time has called for people to reassess, I'm seeing/hearing the same idea everywhere about how creativity is THE ingredient that makes someone successful. It's a little different from the well-worn statement "Think Outside the Box"--or Taco Bell's twist, "Think Outside the Bun"--because it's not so much an exhortation as an explanation of what works.

All these thoughts came together on my dinner plate a few weeks ago, when Ralph took the family to Ray's Hell-Burger in Arlington, Va., for dinner. Just when I thought I had reached the apotheosis of hamburger-dom with the foothold gained by Five Guys in our part of the country, along came Ray (his real name is Michael Landrum), who doesn't have a line down the sidewalk outside his burger establishment at both lunch and dinner because he's thinking outside the bun, it's because he's thinking inside of it--only better. Comparing what he's done to the humble hamburger is like comparing a Bugatti to a VW Bug. They're both cars, but that's where the similarity stops. His freshly ground, hand-trimmed beef on a brioche roll topped with a choice of artisan cheeses, among other primo condiments, was a revelation to me, because I've been having the "everything under the sun has already been done" debate with Ralph for more than a decade vis a vis writing. Ralph's argument: just do it your way and people will come.

As if to prove that Hell-Burger, and therefore, Ralph's rationale, was not a fluke, along came Surfside, another new eatery, this one in Washington's Glover Park neighborhood. What the chef, David Scribner, has opened is not so much a restaurant as a commissary. You mark down your order on a sheet of paper, find your own table, and pick up your meal when the electronic gizmo they hand you lights up. But what you bite into is not cafeteria fare at all. It's fresh Tex-Mex meets Tahiti, with guacamole that arrives in huge chunks and just the right side of spicy. I didn't actually taste the seafood, but I take the Washington Post's food critic, Tom Sietsema's word that it's great. (Only Sam, who wants to start his own food blog, had a complaint, which is that the chips were too salty.) The taller among us were thrilled with the inexpensive prices, the availability of margaritas, the quality, and the fact that we were in by 5:30, out by 6:15, and on to Max's Best Ice Cream for dessert, which though it's been around for awhile, follows the same concept of doing it the same but better: you won't confuse what's in your cone with a scoop of Ede's. 

I hate it when Ralph is right! But as long as he is, I'm wondering if you've come across any examples of the same-old thing turned out-of-this-world? 

 

  

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?

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?

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."

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.  

 

Inconsistency 2.0

A few more thoughts to my last post on routine--or lack thereof.

Years ago, when I was in my formative 20s and living in New York, I was an acolyte to Anna Quindlen's column in the New York Times called "Life in the 30s." I was surprised today when I just found out that Quindlen wrote it for only two years ('86 to '88), because it had such a huge influence on me. And even though I've passed by my 30s altogether, it still does. For instance: I remember her column admitting that once when she was unable to find a pair of stockings for a luncheon, she resorted to wearing her husband's socks inside her boots. No one was the wiser, of course, and that was the point. 

But at 26 or 27, I was somewhat taken aback by Quindlen's small act of defiance. In Atlanta where I grew up--and particularly in my parents' house--propriety was one of the core values. We were drilled on how to make a bed (hospital corners and tucked in tightly enough that you could bounce a quarter off the mattress à la Air Force in which my dad was a colonel); we were schooled in setting a proper table (only put the forks on top of the napkin if you're at a picnic and the napkin would otherwise blow away); we were expected to thank-you notes in writing for birthday wishes merely delivered over the phone. 

Somehow I carried those lessons intact through my first marriage, (gasp) my divorce (the neighbors weren't happy), and on to Washington, where, as a divorceé I moved in with my boyfriend to my parents' utter horror (again, there were the neighbors to consider). That boyfriend, Ralph, is the one who really challenged these age-old notions. When I said I couldn't, wouldn't put pots on the table at a dinner party, he reminded me that the point was to gather friends around the table, not what the table looked like. And once those properly scrubbed Calphalon pans made their debut in the dining room, the rest of the edifice began to crumble, too.

Things really fell apart when we had children. Mismatched socks (not hidden by boots) are routine in our house. We're lucky if we can find matching shoes--or any shoes at all (sometimes we have to resort to mismatched flip-flops). 

All this improvisation bothers me a bit--I wonder if my children will ever know how to make a bed or if Julia will think that a flowered shirt and plaid pants actually match instead of being the only two clean pieces of clothing available. I did make Sam write thank-you notes for his presents--at least to his grandparents.

Mainly though, I've come to think the means justify the ends in this case: get out the door and get on with living. My take-away point from Quindlen two decades ago was that even the perfect life is imperfect.

Back to Back to Back to Back to School

Sam's school hosted its Back to School Night a few evenings ago--that annual event where your name suddenly becomes YOUR CHILD's NAME HERE's Mom and you have to squeeze into tiny chairs at really low tables while focusing on the teachers' every word. Displaying their dizzying energy, Sam's two teachers led us through the morning meeting--songs, date, weather, colors, shapes--all in Spanish, before turning to their power point presentation highlighting things like the importance of good nutrition and the perils of flip flops in school.

One of their topics was consistency, an idea that has been creeping into my consciousness lately. Routine, as you may have heard, is GOOD for children, who need the same breakfast at the same time of day, the same well lighted desk to do their homework at the same time, and the same drill that moves them from the dinner table (you guessed it--served at the same time each night) to bed. 

Our house is full of affection, encouragement--even nutritious food. But as a seat-of-the-pants operation, we're desperately low on routine of any kind. It's always been thus for me: when I worked in New York and was supposed to take the 6:06 train (or whatever) to Greenwich, Conn., each night, I failed utterly at living by a train schedule, not to mention the marriage that accompanied it. Eventually, I moved back to Manhattan--alone. Ralph, who might be roped into habitual behavior more easily than I nonetheless works odd hours--days, nights, and weekends-- the schedule of which is rarely the same twice. So it might be me pouring the Puffins or scrambling the eggs and taking the kids to school or it might not be. Ditto with pickup and dinner. And I like it that way. One of the reasons I married Ralph is that I knew he would never be home for dinner every night and that I could therefore eat Golden Grahams standing over the kitchen sink. The one routine I truly embrace!

I think it was Woody Allen who said that 90 percent of life is just showing up, as though showing up were the easy part. I am here to point out the folly of that idea. For example: getting Sam to school the first day was full of excitement; this morning (day 18), we were all a bit more disheveled and not quite as prompt. God knows what we'll be like by the time June rolls around, but if last year is any indication, it won't be pretty.

Sam, who is something of a child hypochondriac, told my friend Katy a few days ago that he had "atendonitis" in his leg. I heard it as "attend-initis." And I thought, Are you kidding? It must run in the family!

Do You Know Your "Disaster Personality?"

Among the many reasons I married my husband, one of the least talked about is his uncommon ability to take the measure of a situation. Back in the late 90s, he insisted that either we jump into the escalating Washington real-estate market IMMEDIATELY!!! or we would be cast out--far out--to the suburbs. The condo he chose to avert our impending doom, though a bargain, wasn't one I wanted to live in, and I often scoffed that he treated our flimsily constructed four walls and a roof garden in a hip (read seedy) part of town as if it were the last chopper out of Saigon. But it quickly became evident that he'd been right. Within a staggeringly short time entry-level prices went from the $300s to the $800s and if you weren't already in, you were out of luck.

As a Jew--and a person who follows the rules--I long ago decided that I would have ignored the danger signs in prewar Germany that would have sent Ralph packing to safety. And on 9/11/01 I knew that I would have heeded the announcements to stay put in one of the towers where he would have headed for the stairs--and taken five coworkers with him. So I listened with interest to a rebroadcast of The Diane Rehm Show yesterday, where Time reporter Amanda Ripley discussed her book The Unthinkable, which came out this past July.

It turns out that having the confidence to handle whatever comes your way could spell the difference in your success. More than a stockpile of water and duct tape in the basement is mental preparation, i.e., do you know where the exit is on your plane? In your Cineplex 22? I'm not confident yet, but listening to Ripley, I was optimistic for the first time that I could not only "get to know" my disaster personality--how you react in freefall--but to build a better one. 

As for the real-estate market, well...if only Merrill Lynch had listened to Ralph.