Keeping busy, staying happy

Initially, it seemed like such a good idea. Since Holly was off to spend the weekend with her cousins, it was the perfect time for Rick and me to bring Tim and three of his friends up to Maine for Tim’s belated birthday celebration.  Both kids would have something special to do; neither one would feel left out of the fun.

But as the weekend approached, I began to suspect I’d taken on a little bit too much at one time. My mind was a jumble of details. Had I submitted the paperwork to the airlines for Holly to fly as an Unaccompanied Minor? Had I researched the ferry schedule in case Tim and his friends wanted to go biking on one of the Casco Bay islands? What time would we need to leave for the airport to get Holly checked in for her Friday morning flight? How many quarts of milk and orange juice would four 16-year-old boys consume in 48 hours? Did I have the two forms of ID I’d need for expedited airport security? Did Rick have the access card to the Portland garage?

By Friday morning, I thought my head would burst open and all the details would come rolling out. Just get through this weekend, I coached myself. Just get Holly safely off to DC; just keep the boys well-fed and reasonably supervised; and then you can de-stress.

And whether because of, or in spite of, my stressing over all the details, everything went beautifully. Holly had a wonderful time visiting her cousins. Tim and his friends were boisterous and cheerful, and much to my surprise, there was still food left in the pantry when their weekend in Maine ended.

Okay, I told myself when I woke on Monday morning. Now you can stop worrying about the weekend. It’s behind you and it was a success.

And then I remembered that Thanksgiving is in ten days and I still haven’t ordered our turkey (or the chicken or duck that we’ll need to make Tim’s beloved Turducken). Also the annual gathering Rick and I host every year for my high school crowd is next Monday and I should start planning for that. Also we need to choose a date for the annual holiday cookie exchange, which usually falls the first week in December. Also I should start working on our Christmas card.

It’s the nature of life as we currently live it that there aren’t really days when nothing needs to be planned or assessed or overseen. And sometimes it’s stressful. Especially at this time of year. I try to remind myself it’s all supposed to be fun, and if the stress of any individual undertaking outweighs the fun, I shouldn’t do it.  After all, we don’t have to host the annual high school gathering. We don’t even have to host Thanksgiving. And we certainly don’t have to send out Christmas cards.

But we will do all of those things, because ultimately, the fun does outweigh the stress, or the traditions wouldn’t exist.

In this morning’s paper, I read an article about homeless women in Boston who are now sleeping in parks and under bridges because the shelter in which they were living abruptly closed due to infrastructural problems.

“That’s what stress looks like,” I reminded myself. “Carrying around your belongings in a cardboard box because you have no place else to put them. Trips to visit cousins….belated birthday celebrations….holiday parties….holiday poems….those are not stress. Those are recreation.”

Of course they are, and of course any one of the women in the article would happily (and probably quite capably) take on any one of my sources of anxiety.

Have fun, I reminded myself. The holiday season is beginning.

And I will. I’ll remember that the stress and anxiety are trivial compared to the joy of getting together with family and friends. And it will all be wonderful, just as it is every year. 

The quiet at the end of Thanksgiving Day

I really love Thanksgiving. I love the menu-planning. I enjoy the cooking prep that begins the weekend before and extends right through Thursday midday (my very last culinary act yesterday was to assemble an apple crisp and slide it into the oven at 2 p.m., just as Rick finished carving the turkey). I even relish the supermarket trips that take me to three or four stores in place of the usual one or two in order to find exactly what I have in mind (produce from Whole Foods, staples from Market Basket, cheese – of remarkably high quality at remarkably low prices – from Trader Joe’s, and fowl – turkey, duck and chicken for the legendary dish known as turducken – from Roche Brothers, because that was the only butcher I could find willing to debone all three for me the week of Thanksgiving). I love the way everyone in my husband’s family of origin praises my cooking throughout the meal because they’re glad I hosted and they didn’t, and I appreciate the fact that my sisters-in-law and my nieces are always up for a walk after we eat.

But I always forget that one of the best parts of the day comes after the guests leave, when the table is cleared, the dishwasher is running, the leftovers are in the fridge, and for at least an hour or so, no one is asking me what they can have to eat.

It’s such a peaceful time. Darkness falls early on Thanksgiving; our guests left yesterday at around 4:30, and by 5 it was dark. I hadn’t had time to read the newspaper that morning, having gone for a run and then started in on the remaining cooking and kitchen preparation tasks, so I sat down with the kids and my Kindle. I read; Tim watched football; Holly worked on her Christmas wish list. Rick was already sound asleep, explaining to me that a long nap was critical since he’d be up late watching the Patriots game.

The sense of peace came from more than just having it be the end of a busy day. There’s something about Thanksgiving that feels like the deep cleansing breath before the holiday season kicks off. We’re not big holiday shoppers; we won’t be at any malls or department stores on Black Friday or quite possibly for the entire holiday season, but there’s still a lot to do once December begins. And even though most of it is a lot of fun – concerts, pageants, parties – it’s still good to have a conscious moment of rest before the calendar dates start filling in.

My family of origin likes to have Thanksgiving dinner at night; when we were growing up, we’d do other things all day – those who weren’t cooking, anyway – and then get into feast mode at about 6 p.m. It took me a while to get used to an early afternoon Thanksgiving meal; the first few years we celebrated on that schedule, which is more traditional in my husband’s family, I felt like we’d missed out on all the other possibilities of a free day. But I’ve come to like the schedule, eating a big holiday meal and then having the late afternoon and evening free.

So Thursday evening was blissfully serene. By a little after six, the kids were starting to ask me what they could have to eat, but even that was easy; they were happy with reheated mashed potatoes, leftover cooked carrots, a small slice of pie. All I felt like eating by that time was cottage cheese on crackers. I wish there were more nights with the hushed calm of Thanksgiving night. I felt thankful for a lot this year: health, happiness, security of various kinds. But as night fell, I also felt thankful for that particular moment: the quiet after the storm, even though it’s a good storm.

Thanksgiving, as performed by the third grade

Yesterday morning I attended a Thanksgiving play in Holly’s third-grade classroom, a 13-scene musical drama that gives every child in the class the chance to play the part of a modern-day grandparent, a Pilgrim woman, a 17th-century Wampanoag tribesman, an ear of corn, or some other critical role in the Thanksgiving story.

It was a good production, just as it was when Tim was in the same play three years ago. From my perspective, it seems to reflect a vital if somewhat fabled narrative from U.S. history in simple but honest terms, and aspects that are sometimes overlooked, such as how miserable the Pilgrims were during their 66 days at sea and how difficult it was for them to survive their first New England winter, will likely stay in these kids’ memories as they learn more about U.S. history.

In a way, productions such as this one seem kind of anachronistic. By today’s standards of diversity, the traditional tale of Pilgrims learning from Native Americans, or “Indians,” how to plant crops, seems a bit quaint; it’s more typical at our school to see a depiction of a little-known Serbian folk tale than something as traditionally American as the Thanksgiving story.

But I’m glad this pageant hasn’t gone the way of Christmas, considered too Eurocentric and Christian to hold a place in the school setting. As Holly’s teacher pointed out to us, putting on a classroom play deploys all kinds of skills and lessons. On the most basic level, there was history in learning the story, art in designing the scenery, music in practicing the theme song. But there was also poise in learning to deliver lines effectively, group cooperation skills enhanced by working in sync with classmates, patience in waiting for other kids to deliver (or remember) their lines, even the skill of flexibility, embodied by two children who took on extra lines and jobs in yesterday’s performance to cover for an absent classmate.

Like most public schools, ours focuses a lot these days on benchmarks and data. Measuring the knowledge developed by spending three or four weeks preparing a play is harder than measuring math acquisition or reading comprehension, and yet to spend a half-hour in the classroom watching these twenty kids perform is to realize how much happens in their minds as they work on this kind of undertaking. Not least is the fact that their own teacher wrote the play and its theme song; for a child like mine who says – at least for now – that she doesn’t really like being on stage, it introduces the idea that there are other roles besides acting within the wider realm of drama – playwrights, lyricists, costume designers – and that creativity takes on myriad forms.

I appreciate the chance I had yesterday to attend the play. Not only is it always fun to see Holly and her classmates working on something together, but it’s good to be reminded even in the simplest terms possible of the events that brought about modern-day Thanksgiving. By this evening, I’ll be elbow-deep in stuffing and pumpkin pie filling, with still more to do tomorrow morning before dinner is ready to serve. It’s easy to get lost in the culinary details of Thanksgiving dinner. Moreover, on Sunday mornings throughout the year as I rush to get ready for church, I hardly ever stop to think about the fact that going to church is a choice I’m able to make. Thanks to my visit to the third grade, I’ll be thinking about those poor seasick Pilgrims and how profoundly important religious freedom was to them as I chop onions and set the table.

Because time would not stop for me...

The subject line of the email from the cooking website caused my eyes to narrow as it flashed across my inbox yesterday afternoon. “Thanksgiving menu: it’s not too late to start planning!”

Of course it’s not too late, I muttered to myself irritably. It’s not even close to being too late! Thanksgiving is still eight days away.

But in truth, I know it’s also not too early. In fact, I myself should be planning my Thanksgiving menu. And on some level I am. Kind of, In the back of my mind. But not with the zeal I usually plan Thanksgiving.

And when a friend said today that she was already humming Christmas carols and basking in a Christmas mood, I told her I was still in an October mood and working hard to get to a Thanksgiving one. I’m doing everything I can to make time stand still, and yet strangely enough, it’s not working.

I just feel that this autumn is going by too fast. There’s no reason I feel that way this particular year, except that this autumn has allowed me to become so immersed in my writing and the kids’ new school year and some new article ideas and the publication of my book and getting to know the area around my parents’ new vacation home and a host of interests and activities to which fall lends itself. And all of that somehow seems to come to a screeching halt once the holidays approach. New school year? Try Thanksgiving vacation followed three weeks later by winter break, with report cards in between the two to remind you that the year is already exactly one-third over. One-third over? But I’m just getting used to the idea that Tim is in middle school. I don’t want to hear that seventh grade is already looming. I want it to be the first week of school for as long as possible.

But it’s not, of course. It’s seven days ‘til Thanksgiving. I love cooking Thanksgiving dinner. I’ve done it yearly since 1999 with only one exception. For that matter, I like cooking and menu-planning at any time of year. It’s not the domestic side of the situation that’s causing my agitation this year; it’s simply the chronological part. Winter holidays? Really? But I was so happy watching the leaves change.

It’s inevitable, and fall more than any other season seems to bring out the resistance in many of us to see time pass. So I’ll keep writing, keep finding time to walk in the woods, keep up everything that made this fall such a resonant time for me, and also nudge myself onward to the preliminary steps of holiday planning.

After all, no one says that has to mean six different pies on the Thanksgiving table or hours of Christmas shopping at the mall. Holiday season can mean whatever you want it to mean, including writing, reading and walks in the woods. But regardless of what it may mean to different people, simply as a function of the sun rising and setting, Thanksgiving will soon be here, and I have a menu to plan. Fortunately, as the email I received yesterday assured me, it is indeed not too late.

Giving thanks for...the kids' clutter (really!)

Having planned in the week leading up to Thanksgiving to count down the days in my blog by giving thanks for the various non-essential delights that grace my life, you’d think I’d be extra attuned this week to anything that might meet the criteria. The general idea is to go beyond what I call the massive things – the presence of family and friends; physical and mental health; food; shelter; freedom – and acknowledge the many other beloved everyday things that might not make it into a Thanksgiving toast.

But after I mentioned in another communication that due to an inexplicable failure of wireless connectivity in my home office I’ve been working today in my son’s room, at his little wooden desk, surrounded by his sports pennants and baseball cards, Twitter correspondent Jack Ferriter pointed out to me that there’s another item for my list of non-essential but wonderful things worthy of Thanksgiving week thanks: the clutter of toys and other paraphernalia that reflect my kids’ presence in the house.

Of course, when it comes time to pick up all their stuff, thankful is often the last thing I’m feeling (unless my inspiration for picking everything up off the floor is the imminent monthly arrival of the housecleaner, for which I always give thanks). But it’s true: our children’s beloved chotchkes remind us of their unique qualities, their hobbies, their passions, their idiosyncrasies. In Lionel Shriver’s mesmerizingly horrifying novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, one way Shriver conveys the character’s psychopathic tendencies is by describing the sterile tidiness of his childhood room, in which not a toy or game or stuffed animal or book mars the surface of the furniture or floor. This detail has stuck with me for years in its ability to imply a child’s chillingly un-childlike personality.

So when I view the clutter that follows my kids around like Pigpen’s dust cloud in Peanuts, I remind myself to feel grateful.

Along with the sports pennants on the wall and the baseball cards scattered across his desk, Tim’s most prized objects include his 10-year-old stuffed frog, Ba, and his newer but somewhat shabby gray elephant, Vicon. Both animals can usually be found draped across whatever chair or tabletop is nearest to Tim if he’s in the house; when he’s at school he leaves them on the mudroom bench so that he’ll see them as soon as he gets home. Tim also treasures the race numbers he collected at a series of road races he ran over the past two years as well as myriad baseball trophies and ribbons, and the coin collection his grandfather gave him, and a pile of baseball hats from every team he’s ever played on.

Holly’s clutter is a little less resonant with significance than Tim’s. Whereas Tim’s clutch of special belongings comprises things he’s had for a long time that are infused with special meaning to him, Holly just plain collects odds and ends, most of which she eventually uses in crafts projects (or plans to, anyway. Or so she says). Strewn across the rug in Holly’s room are beads of all sizes, straws, pipe cleaners, barrettes, recipe cards, paper clips, post-it notes. “Can I have that?!!” she pleads when I remove the disposable packaging from almost any grocery, whether it’s the cardboard carton that strawberries are packed in or the Styrofoam tray from a package of drumsticks. Kleenex boxes, cereal boxes, egg cartons: they all end up in Holly’s room. Last month I made pumpkin cupcakes for Halloween; now the unused cupcake papers are on her bookshelf. She loves to collect little odds and ends of all kinds. What isn’t to be used in a crafts project instead becomes a stand-in for a character in one of her imaginary play scenarios. One day she was engrossed in a game of imaginary school in the kitchen while I prepared dinner. I plucked a piece of dried macaroni that somehow hadn’t made it into the pot of boiling water with the others off the floor and threw it away. “Mom!” she gasped, horrified, “that’s the principal!”

So Jack Ferriter is right: their possessions, permanent and temporary, valuable and disposable, are all items to be thankful for, because these trinkets and chotchkes represent their personalities, for which I am always grateful. And if it sometimes seems that I spend a lot of time picking tiny beads out of the soles of my feet or dusting baseball trophies, I suppose it’s a small price to pay compared to the gratitude I feel for my unique and wonderful children.

Giving thanks for...running!

Continuing my Thanksgiving countdown with gratitude for the less-than-massive things that enhance my life, I suppose it’s no surprise that eventually I would get to the topic of running.

Being grateful for good health and physical (as well as mental) well-being falls into the category of massive things to be grateful for, but the simple act of running takes a more granular view. I’m grateful that my physiological profile includes the strength, mobility and stamina to run, but I’m also just grateful that running exists. As I’ve been reminded hundreds of times throughout my adult life, running isn’t for everyone. There are some people, even physically able people, who are injury-prone and clearly just not destined to be runners; there are others who could do it but just dislike it. Running tends to be something you either love or hate. I’m really grateful to fall into the former category. I love running and have ever since I was eighteen years old and took up running during my first summer vacation from college.

I’ve run regularly everywhere I’ve ever lived, though that isn’t that many places: the Fenway and Kenmore neighborhoods in Boston surround my college campus when I first started, Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood where I lived just after college, the areas around our first apartment in Framingham and then our first home on the other side of the same town, and now the various running routes I’ve established from our Carlisle home.

I haven’t lived many places, but I’ve traveled a lot, and run everywhere I’ve visited. Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, California, Colorado, Florida, Wyoming (one of the most memorable runs I’ve taken was outside of Cody, Wyoming. I picked out a single tree on the horizon and started running down the horizon toward it. Twenty-five minutes, which is to say about 2.5 miles, later I reached that tree, turned around and ran back. It’s the only place I’ve ever run where I could see my halfway point from my starting line.). Also England, France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Venezuela, Aruba, Bermuda (which from a traffic perspective was the most dangerous place I’ve run. From the perspective of sheer bad judgment, I’d vote for Venezuela. Suffice to say endorphins can be a dangerous drug. But on the subject of judgment, the one place I didn’t run was in Kenya, because the safari guides bluntly forbid it). I ran on the open-air track on the top deck of a cruise ship plying the waters of the eastern Caribbean. I’ve run with my sisters, my brothers-in-law, a cousin, my nieces, friends and co-workers, but mostly over the years I’ve run alone, other than the two years during which my son Tim and I ran together nearly every day. I’ve had two different dogs as regular running partners over the years. I’ve listened to good music, bad music, restaurant review shows, football games and tens of thousands of hours of NPR while running.

So when people look at my running record and call me committed, I say no, just lucky. During the two-year daily running streak that my son Tim and I did together, I was always a little sheepish when people said they were impressed; to me it was astoundingly good fortune that neither of us was sick, injured or otherwise unable to run during those 732 days. Now that I’m continuing with the daily running streak alone – and on day 835 as of this afternoon – I continue to feel remarkably lucky. An H1N1 fever or broken bone could be all it would take to compel me to take a day off, and so far that hasn’t happened.

So mostly, during this week of Thanksgiving, I feel grateful for good health in big ways: the absence of serious illness or disability. But I also feel thankful for the sheer joy that daily running brings me, and has for seemingly as long now as I can remember. It could end any time (as could everything I’m thankful for). But I’m so glad for it right now, on this day, with the hope that I’ll be out running again tomorrow.

Giving thanks for...household appliances

On my second day of giving thanks for things less important than health, peace, food, shelter, love and safety but still worthy of a Thanksgiving nod, I’m feeling especially grateful for household appliances.

Perhaps I’m channeling my Russian peasant ancestors (assuming I had Russian peasant ancestors; I’m not entirely sure), but it still amazes me to look at all the conveniences at my fingertips and how effortlessly they all seem to function. They are like our household servants, except with no attitude (the very mention of which might suggest I’ve read too many Victorian novels). Not only do they ask so little in return; they don’t, as far as I know, talk about us behind our backs or even harbor their own opinions about us. (Though it’s amusing to imagine what the washing machine might mutter to the dryer when everyone is asleep: “If I have to deal with pee one more time…why they can’t just insist the kid keep wearing nighttime diapers is utterly beyond me. So she’s seven years old, so what? How would you like to have someone throw pee-soaked sheets into your midsection day after day?” And then the dryer might respond with something along the lines of “At least you don’t feel used. I’m loved only for my inner warmth. I know that boy claims his shirts are still damp even after I’ve done a comprehensive job of drying them just so he has an excuse to put them back in and get them nice and toasty right before he leaves for school.”

Well, whether they gossip about us or not, I love those appliances. I try to follow good energy practices as far as how and when and how often to run them all, but even taking that into account, it gives me such a feeling of good fortune to stack the last plate in the dishwasher, throw one more sock into the washing machine, adjust the thermostat down a degree or two and start the oven preheating and know that all of those appliances will do just what I’ve asked. Ice chunking down in the freezer; cookies baking; wrinkles in shirts placidly disappearing until the firm flat weight of the iron. I’m grateful to the Cuisinart for the way it minces onions and shreds cheese; I appreciate the toaster for transforming bagels from good to delicious. Meanwhile the phone brings me the voice of one friend and my computer the words of another. When I get back from a run, a warm shower removes every trace of sticky sweat.

Once or twice every winter we lose electricity for a few hours, sometimes longer. As an adult, I don’t find that situation cozy and romantic the way I did when I was a kid; I get frustrated at the things I can’t do, but I look forward to the elation that comes when everything suddenly hums back into action. At the same time, I feel a touch of that every day, even days without power outages, when the things I need to use seem to so effortlessly function. Or, in the rare times that they’re not – such as our refrigerator, which mysteriously refused to drop below a tepid 57 degrees earlier this week – that there are people available to fix them and capable of doing so.

Living off the grid is a very interesting concept, and one that we will probably all be learning more about in the next few years. I might be wise to try to become less dependent on my plugged-in things. But I don’t think it’s so much a matter of dependency as a matter of keen appreciation. I could wash my clothes by hand, sweep instead of vacuum, write letters instead of e-mail. But I appreciate the fact that I don’t have to. I appreciate all the little humming engines, motors and power sources that make my life so much easier than it might otherwise be.