Concerted effort

My favourite Christmas carol is God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, because as an alto I can't get up high enough for all the other ones.

I used to sing in choirs. I don't have a particularly good voice, or a particularly strong voice, and I can only stay in tune when surrounded by a group of people also singing the same thing, but I enjoyed it and I can read music decently enough not to go horribly noticeably wrong. I also showed up for practice, which is always a bonus from a director's point of view.

My husband has also sung in choirs for many years. He's much better at it than I am, being what you might call legitimately musical and with a nice voice to boot. He'll even sing alone in front of other people, if you ply him with a drink or three. And it will sound good.

At Christmas, the Messiah is what we should be singing. I sang in the Messiah several times, in school and college and afterwards too. I could probably still get a fairish proportion of the alto line right, if given a score and placed right in the middle of all the other altos. Some day, I'll go to a singalong Messiah and do that, I hope.

For years, the choir concert was part of the beginning of Christmas. Long black skirt, black long-sleeved top, putting on my makeup in the bathrooms in the Science building of UCD, or the ones Dramsoc used in the LGs of the Arts block. Waiting upstairs in the O'Reilly Hall, going through those last few bits where I still went wrong, marking them with a pencil so at least I'd know where to stop singing for two or three notes rather than mess it up. The sound of an orchestra tuning up; it's like the clinking of ropes on masts in the harbour on a breezy summer's day. Sometimes I was in the orchestra instead - third clarinet or something like that. Again, not very good, but a show-er-up.

I love the anticipation, the lights, being on stage, being important but camouflaged as one of many. Not being the one who faints, that's vital; there's always one. Watching the conductor, trying not to giggle, turning pages silently. Looking out for parents, friends, whoever you could strongarm to come along. Smiling keeps you in tune. File out row by row, one by one.

On the whole, I enjoy a concert a lot more when I'm part of it than when I'm just watching. But we should find a concert to go to, because it's not Christmas without one.

Old dog, new trick

My dad is 84. I remember when his office got its first computer - I must have been around eight or ten. He would come home with tales of how the secretary - whom everyone loved and who, despite her glamorous blonde hair, was far from an airhead - had lost some file or other again, thanks to the silly machine. He had no time for this new technology. He kept his files, his records, his drawings, his specifications, his letters, safely and securely on paper, in filing cabinets, where they were swiftly to hand when the need arose.

About six years later the recession (the other recession, the one in the 80s) hit the building trade hard (history repeats itself) and with it, the architectural firms. His company was reduced to two men - himself and his partner, now the senior members - who retreated to their respective homes and worked from there, renting out the floor that used to be a workspace for thirty employees.

Luckily, we had a basement room that he could use as an office, and I remember the day all his huge hanging files of blueprints and plans were moved in, in giant cabinets that took up most of the space, leaving a thin passage for him to walk between, and of course a place for a tall stool at the angled drawing board. It may have been then that we acquired our first home computer - an Amstrad with a nice green screen and square type that functioned mostly as a word processor. It also had two games, which I played to death. It never occurred to us to get any more games for it, though I suppose they were available.

Luckily for us, my dad's partner is a couple of decades younger and an early adopter of new technology, so every time he upgraded his computer we would be the happy recipients of the hand-me-down. Thus we progressed, eventually, from the Amstrad to an Apple, and a newer Apple, and finally even one with a colour screen. I learned to type from Mavis Beacon on one of those Apples, for which I will be eternally grateful. There was even a modem attached by this time - a phone-line modem, the sort that crackled and screeched and cost as much as a local phone call - which in Ireland is not free. But nobody ever used it, because it was too much of a hassle, and the Internet was not very interesting yet, and it took a long time to work.

My dad only ever used the computer as a word processor, and continued to print out, photocopy, and file all his paperwork just as he had always done. He never saved anything, except by accident, so that every now and then I'd go home and try to clean up the desktop, littered with things nobody wanted any more. My mum used it too, for her official correspondence, in the same way. I set them up with an e-mail account, but they never used it. "I'm too old for that," my dad would say, self-deprecatingly, when I suggested that it might be nice to have. He couldn't really see the point. He continued to do his drawing work by hand, faxing things through to people who couldn't wait, sending letters by snail mail, talking on the phone. He was past retirement age, but he kept going as long as he had clients who would work with him in spite of his Ludditeism.

In only the last few years, things have changed. He really has retired now, the office downstairs is mostly disused, he and my mother face health problems of varying types. They have mobile phones, which stay nicely charged in their cradles, and are never used. I doubt either of them could figure them out at this point. Texting would be way beyond them.

But then. This is not a sad story of how technology that seems peripheral can become so central to life that people have difficulty interacting with you when you don't use it. This is a story of hope and new beginnings. Of old dogs who do, after all, learn new tricks.

Because my dad's partner, a good man without parallel, refused to give up on the idea of setting my father up with technology that could improve his life. He upgraded his iPad and gave Dad the old one. Dad got the house wired for broadband (though Eircom seemed to sit on that particular challenge for about six months). My dad mastered the art of the touchscreen, figured out that this one was pretty hard to mess up, kept at it, and now sends me an e-mail most days. I can send him little tidbits from our day, a photo embedded in an e-mail so he doesn't even have to click away to see it, and he and my mother can see into our lives over here, so very far away, from a new angle.

My dad doesn't like the phone. He's the sort of father who says "I'll get your mother," at the first opportunity when I ring home. If trapped, because she's not home, he'll talk about the weather, or current affairs. (He gets his news from the radio at 9am and 1pm and the television at 9pm promptly. Missing the headlines is a bad, bad thing. I put a shortcut on the iPad to The Irish Times website when I was at home, but I'm not sure if he's using that yet.) Anyway. I've inherited his dislike of phones, to some extent, so e-mail is the perfect medium for both of us. I don't think he'll be on Facebook any time soon, but baby steps are fine with me.

It's a tiny thing, but it's a great thing. If Steve Jobs is to thank for this, then I'm thanking Steve Jobs. I'm also thanking my Dad, who's not been feeling so great lately but has powered through and made himself keep at this, picking up the iPad every day and trying to send me a message, even though sometimes it doesn't seem to work, or the router has a red light and isn't doing what it should, or he might think he has nothing to say. I'm proud of him for finally admitting that he's not too old a dog after all.

The secret life of books

I started reading Charlotte's Web to Mabel last night. She's heard bits of it before, when B was reading it to Dash about a year (or more) ago, and she was concerned that she wouldn't like it. She asked me to promise before we started that the pig doesn't die. I said he didn't.

I didn't mention the spider.

I love reading books I loved to my children; but more than that, I really love having the exact copies I read to pass on to them. There's so much history there. Even if some of it isn't even mine. Case in point, this edition.

                                                 

I'm pretty sure I bought it at my local second-hand bookshop (the wonderful and sadly now defunct Exchange, in Dalkey). I couldn't tell you when, but I might have been around ten. It probably cost about 25p. It's a 1976 edition, and still has its original pricetag on the back:

I don't know where or what the APCK bookshop was, but I love that it was 49 and a half pence. The halves mattered.

On the inside, the plot thickens, because there's this:

This is a nuns' book! 

And further, this, written with one of those invisible-ink pens that didn't show up until you rubbed the other end over where you'd written. I had one of those pens, but Thomas Galin (sp?) is not me.

For some reason, I never wrote my own name in, but I can guarantee that it has been sitting on my bookshelf for longer than it sat in the library of the junior school at Mount Anville or on the shelves of one Thomas Galin. And now it can sit on one of my children's shelves, at least for a while.

******

I hope she doesn't get upset about the spider.

Things about me

But first I have to steal one of my husband's points about himself, because it's so wonderful that it deserves a wider audience:

For some period around the age of 7, I became convinced I was actually Orinoco Womble. The Wombles merchandising at the time included chocolate bars, and I would look at my miniature pointy-nosed face in confusion when visiting the newsagents.

For full enjoyment of this fact, you have to know what both parties looked like: 

Stunning resemblance, no? (Also, clearly there's no argument about whose son Dash is.)

Now that there's no topping that, here are some much less interesting random facts about me.

1. I played Miss Prism in selected scenes from The Importance of Being Ernest in high school. I knew everyone's lines.

2. Around the same time that my future husband was posing as a womble, I used to hide behind the sofa when the Daleks appeared.

3. As soon as the weather gets cold, I lose all blood from my fingers and toes, which is very useful when I want to dress up as a corpse for Halloween but otherwise annoying.

4. I had three boyfriends in first grade, but not one more until after I turned 18.

5. I can still recite, phonetically and probably unrecognizably, the "We are now approaching a station; please mind the gap" phrase from the Prague city train system. I can also ask for two beers in Czech.

6. I have not, and never did have, any wisdom teeth. This does not mean that I am less wise than you, but rather that I am more highly evolved, so there.

Tell me a random fact about yourself.

Wishes

One of the things I wanted to do on this trip was pretty easily attainable. I wanted to go for a walk up the hill. The hill that's close to my parents' house, the one we always went up for a walk, either to the quarry (turn left at the fork in the path) or the obelisk (turn right). One morning the sun was shining (intermittently) and the playground meetup I had planned was postponed and the stars aligned and this is what we did instead.

There's a broad wall to walk along most of the way, making the steps a lot more fun.

You can stop at the shop counter and sell a few twigs or a nice selection of autumnal leaves to the passersby.

And then, just before the obelisk but when you've come out to the breathtaking top of the hill, there are the wishing steps.

Walk around each level in turn, and when you get to the top you can have a wish.

Certain things earn wishes, you know. Birthday candles, of course; falling stars - but other things too, like the first strawberry of the season (also applies to rhubarb) and hopping three times around the base of a round tower. My mother has the definitive list, I believe.

They wished solemnly, to themselves. Mabel couldn't contain a secret, though, and had to tell me when she got down to the bottom again, that she'd wished for a new teddy. Because she's clearly lacking in teddies.

Dash wanted to cash it in as many times as possible. I had to decree that only three wishes could be had on any visit to the steps, because more wishers were arriving. Another family came along and we heard their mother tell them the same thing - walk around and when you get to the top you get a wish.

It's not written on a plaque or an informational leaflet anywhere. It's local folklore, it's how you tell the natives from the tourists.

It's important to know about the wishes. You never know when you might need one.

What you remember

My memories of childhood don't include my parents very much.

I think that's just fine. I don't think it's indicative of anything other than that my parents gave me my space and didn't helicopter over every little thing. (Additionally, I suppose, my memories of childhood are more of when I was eight or nine, say, than when I was four or five.) My mum was at home, my dad was at work. I played at friends' houses and they played at mine; I played outside on my bike with the other kids on the road, and I read books by myself. Lots and lots of books.

Watching Dash and Mabel going crazy together the other day, a friend commented that they're great friends. Well, yes, they're great friends who beat each other up and push each other's buttons and drive each other nuts on a regular basis. "They're very close," I said, because I think that describes it better. When someone habitually sits on your head or wakes you up by jumping on your belly or thumps you in passing because you told them what two plus two was and you wanted to work it out yourself, they're not so much your best friend as an unavoidable part of your day, every day. And because that person would defend you against bad guys and robbers and bedtime, and holds your hand walking down the street, and is always there to scream beside you as you jump up and down on the sofa, you're okay with that.

I love that. I never had it, and I love that they do. I love that when they think of their childhoods they'll think of each other, not so much of us. The parents should be a constant, that's all. A non-variable presence that provides security and stability and a sense of the where the edges lie - what can be done, what's available, how grown-ups behave in grown-up land. Everything else about childhood, really, is about the children.

Family car

As the only child of tidy-minded parents, I always found that other people's cars had an air of messy family-ness that ours lacked. I loved it. I loved the casualness and the randomness and the disorganization. It seemed to be the hallmark of a real family to me, and I loved being subsumed into the families of my more-siblinged friends, whether for a whole week in the summer or just an after-school playdate.

At my house, when we got home, whatever had come with us came out of the car and back into the house, to be thrown away or put away as appropriate. The glove compartment contained one pair of gloves, one pair of sunglasses (in their case), an orange chamois to de-mist the windows with, and the car's owner's manual. (Of course, this was before you needed twelve different adaptors for all the things you might conceivably charge in your car, and also before cars were littered with broken CD cases, defunct cassette tapes, and album inserts that didn't match the contents. We didn't even have a car with a radio until I was 14.)

Other families' cars, though, had cyclinders of wet wipes on the back window and crumbs between the cushions, lost hair bobbins on the floor and abandoned liquorish allsorts under the seats. There was a fine line, of course, between the endearing and the disgusting - used tissues proliferating on the passenger seat, mysterious stickiness on the door handle, half-eaten packets of Tayto scattering as we rounded every corner were definitely out of the grey zone and into the gross.

More often than I could understand, there was a hairbrush in someone's car. My hairbrush never travelled more than a foot from my dressing table, where I picked it up, brushed, and set it down again. My mother's was the same. I always puzzled over the migratory hairbrushes.

------------

Well, I'm happy to report that I've achieved nirvana, where nirvana is the perfectly messy family car. Art projects on the passenger seat? Check. Discarded toy parts and litter and tissues liberally spread around the floor? Check. Crumbs in every crevice? Check. Hairbrush on the back seat? More often than my former self would believe.

Tiny things

One of the slats of Mabel's headboard isn't sanded smooth like the others. I'd never have noticed it, but one night at bedtime I saw her feeling each one. 

"What are you doing?" 

"I'm looking for the rough one."

I felt with her and found the rough one, one from the end on the right.

It's one of those tiny things that children take the time to find out and adults breeze right by. It will be one of the sense memories she retains of her early childhood, of her first bed, of her bedroom and this house.

I remember what the underside of my bed looked like, how it felt to turn my head slideways and slither swiftly under it for a game of hide and seek, where it's rough and smooth and painted, and how it was surprisingly roomy underneath, before I got too big and it wasn't any more. 

I remember the view from inside the hot press (linen cupboard), behind the mound of spare balls of wool for darning, on top of the good damask tablecloth and the other teacosy that was a present and the pillowcases nobody ever used. I hid there for a long time one afternoon, until my seeker had long given up and my mother was getting worried.

I remember the waist-high wall at the back of my best friend's garden, the one we once climbed over to roam through the next garden over and the one after that, until we heard his mother calling in the distance and scrambled hurriedly back to be roundly scolded. The wall was made of rough dark-grey concrete domed over mortared-together granite rocks. The concrete was flaking away in places, where we could pick at it and find the underneath. 

Even when you can go back - and I still can, I'll be there next week - sometimes you need a child to help you see the past properly.

Ancient history

I like Connie Willis. If you've never heard of Connie Willis, well, you're just like the guy in my local bookshop, except that you probably don't work in a bookshop so the fact that she's a really great and popular and quite prolific fantasy writer is not a travesty. But he, he was a travesty. I don't know why Books-A-Million is still alive when all the Borders Books in the area have closed down.

Anyway. This is a very long lead-in to what will probably turn out to no longer be a remotely funny anecdote when I finally get around to it. And I'm not there yet, you'll have to wait.

I don't get in a lot of reading these days, and when I do it goes in fits and starts. It's usually an author I know and love, because I don't have the patience right now to try out books that might be anything less than great. I'll happily re-read old favourites rather than attempt something new - hence the total revisiting of Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey's relationship earlier this year. But I discovered that Connie Willis had written a new* book - in fact, two - and put them on my birthday list. B gave me Blackout for my birthday, and I saved it to read on the way to BlogHer. I finished it last week and discovered that it's not so much the first in a series of two, as half a story, the other half of which is another whole (even fatter) book called All Clear. So of course I had to get my hands on All Clear ASAP, without even waiting for Amazon.

This is why we ended up visiting two bookshops in two days, and why Dash ended up getting two new books in two days, even though there's a perfectly lovely library with plenty of reading matter right there in our town. (Mabel also got one new book.) The first bookshop didn't have any Connie Willis at all (see above), but Dash still had to get something, and he chose a National Geographic Kids book on tigers. The next day in a much better-stocked Barnes & Noble, he picked up a National Geographic Kids book on Martin Luther King and was all excited, so who was I to deny my son the reluctant reader such an educational item?

[Here, just to keep up the thrilling suspense (ahem), let me mention how great those National Geographic Kids books are. Dash is a bright, curious kid with a great vocabulary, but his reading level is not high. So trying to keep him engaged with a book that's easy enough for him not to stumble over every word is often a struggle, because so many of the first readers are insultingly simple. He likes the "I Can Read" superhero books, and they are at a good (easy) level for him, but he also has a selection of the National Geographic ones, and those are what he looks for now in the bookstore.

]

Oh God, now I've built it up so much that I'm afraid to tell my piddly little story.

Anyway.

Schoolkids in America know all about Martin Luther King. The Civil Rights Movement is heavily featured in kindergarten, if not before. Even the nursery-school attendees know about him, thanks to Martin Luther King day in January every year. As an Irish schoolchild, I did not have Martin Luther King anywhere on my radar, but I must have heard his name somewhere along the line.

So at the start of secondary school (seventh grade) our history teacher began by looking at the pictures on the front cover of our textbook, Renaissance and Reformation, I think it was called, and asking if anyone knew what was depicted. Looking at a drawing of an oldy-timey man with long hair hammering a scroll to a wooden door, something I had seen or read elsewhere came back to me, and I tentatively raised my hand.

"Yes, Maud?"
I was diffident but smug: "Is it Martin Luther... King?"

As I said the first two words, it had occurred to me that there was often another one appended. Adding the "King" was an afterthought, really. I thought it would make me sound even cleverer.

Sadly, one word makes all the difference. My teacher went from admiration to amusement in the space of that single syllable. (Though really, she should have been doubly impressed: I knew two historical people, after all, even if I didn't realise it myself.)

This morning I was recounting the story to B, who somehow had never heard it before. Dash wanted to know as well. "You knew about Martin Luther King too?" he asked, incredulous.

Whereupon B had to get all smartypants: "Martin Luther King TWO? There's a sequel? 'He's back and he's mad.'"


*New as in three years ago, apparently.

The hustler

What you might call our first date was, I believe, an arrangement to meet up at our university (in the last week of Easter break) and play some pool. With a friend, probably. To the uninformed viewer it might have seemed casual in the utmost. We might have had lunch in the totally unromantic UCD canteen first. Or maybe we pushed the boat out and got one of those little pizzas on the second floor. I should remember, but I don't.

What I remember is the pool table. We went down to "The Trap", which is what everyone called the pool tables and juke box in the basement of the Arts building, beside all the lockers, and put some coins in a table. I think we found our mutual friend (through whom we had first met two weeks earlier) down there; we certainly weren't alone. It being the holidays, the place wasn't thronged with students avidly avoiding lectures, but it wasn't deserted either. Some people could reliably be found in The Trap no matter what the season or semester.

Now, don't be imagining I'm some sort of pool shark. Tom Cruise and Paul Newman would wipe the floor with me in half a second flat. But ever since my friend and I used to push the white ball around the empty table in the Dunlaoghaire Motor Yacht Club with our hands, or watch the coloured balls lining up with those lovely clicks through the little window to the table's innards, or even when my late lamented Uncle Brian tried to show me how to hold a cue at the age of about seven, I've had a sort of affinity for the game.

(My granny used to watch the snooker on TV. That took some concentration, before she got the color set.)

So B was the one who showed me how to play. (I won't say "taught me" becuase that would imply that I have learned and am now able to do it.) I know the rules and can slide the cue towards the white ball and almost always make it hit one of the others. Something usually goes in a pocket eventually. I don't really care. I love watching the skill of others, the ones who do know what they're doing. I love the almost-frictionless roll of ball towards pocket, watching an engineer calculate the angles, or pretend to, hearing the satisflying click (or the rumble when the white goes down and you wait for the table to send it back to you).

So there we were on our date, having a nice game of pool, not exactly knowing where this was going or how to move things forward. I leaned on the table. I put my hand a little too close to where his hand was also leaning on the side of the table as we waited for our friend to take a shot. The sides of our little fingers touched, and a tiny electric shock went through me. That was enough. The direction was set. Fate was on notice.

Wednesday will be our ninth wedding anniversary, by the way.

We used to play a game of pool now and then, whenever we were in a bar with a pool table, with a couple of friends or just the two of us. I didn't get any better, but I still enjoyed it. Last week on our vacation we had an early dinner one night in a not-very-Italian restaurant attached to a very American bar. We passed the pool table as we walked through the bar to our booth seats. I made a mental note of it. When dinner was over and ice-creams had been screamed for and ordered (politely) and said thank-you for (politely) I suggested we might just see if the pool table was still unused on our way out.

It was. Probably we should not have stopped for a quick game of pool in a bar with our seven year old and our four year old, but we did, and nobody cared, and it was fun. It was fun to impress the kids with this thing they had no idea we would ever do. It was fun to let them chalk our cues and retrieve the white ball and suggest what we might aim for next. They were just about old enough to keep their hands off the balls and the other cues for long enough for B to wipe the floor with my pathetic effort (it takes me most of a game to get my eye in, and it had been a few years) and clear the table, clonk clonk clonk, like a pro.

Or maybe I'm still just easily impressed by some people.

Not to scale

Pedicure

One wholly superficial thing that tends to make an otherwise nice-looking man less attractive to me is long fingernails. Long dirty fingernails are, of course, worse. I had a huge crush on a guy in college until I noticed his nails, and that - happily for me because I was more insignificant than a gnat in his eyes and he was probably a total asshole anyway - put the kybosh on the crush. I was once again able to attend my Greek and Roman Civilization tutorial without blushing furiously and fumbling my pen the entire time.

So when I met B the B, I was happy to see that his fingernails were perfectly groomed. Not long at all. Maybe a tiny bit on the short side, to be honest, but whatever, there is no too short. Unless you're talking about my History teacher in high school who used to bite his so low that they were painful to look at. (No crush there either. Not a hint of one. Good teacher, though.)

So anyway, B and I had probably been married quite a while before I realised that he never clipped or cut or filed his fingernails. "What do you do?" I asked, mystified. "I bite them off," he replied. They don't look bitten. They just look neat. I never see him biting them. I decided that I could live with this, and decided to pretend we'd never had that conversation.

Trouble is, apparently it's genetic. Dash lets me cut his nails very nicely now that he's, you know, seven; though for the first few years of his life I carried the nail clippers with me and would give him a manicure whenever he dropped off in the carseat. Mabel, on the other hand, is a whole other kettle of keratin.

When she was a baby, I suppose I managed to cut her nails as required every now and then, but since the age of about two she's been biting them, just like her father does. They're too short, but they don't look gnawed, exactly. I tell her she'll pull off too much and hurt herself, but it hasn't happened yet.

She also bites her toenails.

I suppose some day in the distant future she'll want to wear nail polish enough to stop herself biting, or else her joints will seize up in old age and she won't be able to get her toes to her teeth any more. In the meantime, this is just one fight I'm not really fighting.

She'll probably blame me when her boyfriend dumps her for doing it, though.

Seven

... And seven years later, I have a seven-year-old.

I have plenty of memories of seven. I was in second class, with our cool just-graduated-from-college teacher who played the guitar and taught us the words to songs from Jesus Christ Superstar. That summer was a standout one because we went on holidays to Corfu (a Greek island), which was my first plane trip, my first experience of a different language and a foreign culture and heat in the air and warmth in the seawater.

I learned to swim there, and had my first taste of scampi. I was a fussy eater and when my parents found that I loved the scampi, they said hang the expense and I ate it every dinnertime. It was idyllic (except for the mosquitoes, which freaked me out in the middle of the night) and it's seared on my memory.

I would love to give Dash an experience like that, one that sticks fast and never leaves him, so that he can still conjure the smells and tastes when he's forty; but maybe you never know what's going to be the thing that remains, or maybe we've given him too much already for him to have one of those standout summer trips.

Or maybe whatever you do when you're seven stays with you for always, because you were seven.

Happy birthday, Dash.

Seven years

Seven years ago, I was a technical writer at a university in south Texas, trying to help department heads hash out some sort of more detailed hurricane plan in the wake of Katrina the year before.
Seven years ago, I had a salary of my very own.
Seven years ago, I saw a lot of movies in the cinema.
Seven years ago, I'd never watched an episode of Curious George.

Seven years ago, my husband was at a conference a plane ride away, and I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant.

Seven years ago, I'd never heard of Facebook.
Seven years ago, I'd already been blogging indolently for a couple of years.

Seven years ago, I knew my life was about to change utterly, and I was about as ready for it as you can be.

Seven years ago - plus a few hours - my waters broke.

I heard the news today, oh boy

When I would come downstairs in the morning, the radio would be on in the kitchen, with my Dad listening to RTE 1. My mum would probably be listening to the same thing on her little "wireless" (yes, they still say that word in my house, and it has nothing to do with the Internet) in the bedroom. On the hour, Dad would approach the radio and stand right beside it, listening intently to the headlines, and anything I happened to say would be summarily shushed.

At nine o'clock every evening the news had to be watched, no matter what else happened to be on telly that might have pushed through that hour. In fact, we didn't tune into programmes that started at odd times like 8.50 on Channel 4 or 8.15 on BBC 2, becuase we'd just miss the end when it came to 9.00 and it was time to turn over to RTE 1 for the nationwide news.

I'm not there any more, but nothing else has changed. I can guarantee you that my Dad was standing by the big radio in the kitchen listening to the news this morning, and will be tuning in again at 1pm (lunchtime news) and watching the TV at nine this evening.

As a child, I didn't really understand this compulsion to find out what was going on. It was only ever boring news (a redundancy of terms, I thought) about another person killed in Northern Ireland - which might as well have been on the other side of the world as far as I was concerned, insulated in South County Dublin - or budget cuts or politicians talking about whatever it was they talked about. Now and then an earthquake or a hijacking to keep it interesting, but nothing that was relevant to me. Certainly nothing that worried me. The only times I remember being affected by headlines are when a family would die in a house fire. I would lie in bed plotting my fire escape route, planning to leap from my bedroom window to the flat roof of next-door's extension.

In this house, where I am the parent, we don't listen to the radio and we don't watch news on TV, unless there's a tornado watch and I have the weather channel on. We get our news from the Internet, at whatever time is convenient, and the children are none the wiser. They barely know what an actual newspaper looks like, so infrequently does one appear in our house.

It wasn't a conscious decision, more a change inspired by lifestyle long before there were children. When I moved here from Ireland I was dazzled by the news channels that either seemed too parochial or bombarded me with constant non-news. I trusted The Irish Times online more than any American news source; though I learned to listen to NPR in the car, and became quite attached to Morning Edition on the way to work each day when we lived in Texas, the unpronouncable names of their announcers, the global reach of their reports, and the warm, comforting voice of Frank Deford, whose amusing takes on sports managed to interest even know-nothing me.

Once Dash was born, though, and went through that inevitable car-hating phase that seems to last for ever, the last thing I wanted was more noise in the car. I started tuning into the classical music station in the hopes that Mozart might calm him down, or at least increase his brain power while he was turning himself red in the face and waving his arms hysterically, breaking the heart of his baby-wearing, co-sleeping mama, trapped a million miles away and trying to keep her blood pressure under control in the driver's seat.

Seven years, two babies, three moves, and one car later, the radio is still mostly stuck on classical NPR, though in the brief moments when I might be driving alone, I'll switch over to the news channel and try to increase my IQ a tiny bit by listening to sensible adults discussing far-reaching things. The last time we heard the news in the car, probably looking for a weather update or something, two minutes of broadcast led to the six-year-old asking, "What's gang rape?" So we won't be doing that again any time soon. (We didn't tell him. I'm all for answering children truthfully, but some things... Just no.)

So my children don't know about the Newtown shootings or the Boston marathon explosions. When B and I want to discuss breaking events, we resort to our pathetic store of Irish vocabulary, or silently motion towards the laptop screen. To be honest, thinking about my own reactions to horrific news - the Enniskillen bombing, for instance, happened when I was 14; Lockerbie, when an aeroplane fell out of the sky onto Scottish people in their beds, a year later - it might all seem distant enough to shrug off. On the other hand, it might terrorize them (mostly Dash, given age and personality), or just gnaw away at them in the dark, like those house fires did to me. The facts that Dash is a first-grader, that we have been to the Boston marathon, might make it seem scarily close, just as they do to me. I don't really know what their reactions would be, but I don't feel the need to find out.

This. So much this.

Will my children be less interested in current events because they don't hear the news every day? I certainly had no interest, and no amount of hearing the news could inspire any, apparently. Should we be discussing the news at the dinner table? At what point will they start hearing the news - when they start reading news websites for themselves? When they have Twitter accounts? I suppose at some point they'll have a Civics class that encourages them to find out more about what's going on, and maybe then we'll finally have to tune in the radio.

How does it work in your house? Do the kids see the news, or do you talk about it? Do you think an interest in current events and/or politics is inborn or cultivated? Did exposure to news events when you were a child go over your head or give you nightmares?

Would we all be better off with less information? Sometimes it certainly feels that way.

XX

April Fool's Day, we decided, was our relationship anniversary date. We weren't quite sure, when we were established enough to be trying to figure it out, exactly which day the party had been on, but it was the last Thursday of the Easter break from college that year. Not that we were officially "going out" instantly - it took a few weeks, maybe a month, to be sure we were allowed use the boyfriend/girlfriend tag for each other. We knew it had been about a week after B had turned 20, so April first seemed right. I decided not to be insulted by the date's practical-joke connotations. It was an omen of laughter, nothing more.

But it's hard to believe that it's been twenty years since I first heard all of Negotiations and Love Songs for the first time, whiling away a lazy Sunday afternoon in his house. What makes it sound so long ago is that it was before we'd ever sent an e-mail, before we'd seen a digital camera, long before we all had phones we could take with us, before anyone had thought of Facebook or Twitter or blogging. We managed to conduct a romance perfectly well without text messages or status updates. We called each other on the home phone; when we arranged to meet in town, we showed up. We used payphones now and then. There was cherry blossom and Paul Simon and pizza and the last Dart home and losing whole afternoons in kisses. And missing the last Dart home.

That was the first beginning, of course. There were endings and beginnings a-plenty again after that, because we both had other things to do and people to see and places to go. It was eleven and a half years before we sealed the deal, and not due to what you might call a long engagement. Just a long and chequered courtship, all the longer for not knowing that it would all turn our right in the end.

But the tipping point has arrived and now we've known each other for longer than we haven't; and I'm surprised it took so long because it feels like we should have known each other for ever and also in previous lives.

---------

And then you have children and the whole thing goes into overdrive and you wake up one morning and wonder how you got to be almost forty, and how you got so lucky as to have everything you ever wanted. And a mobile phone to boot.

Happy 20, B the B.

Oral tradition

There are things I say just because my parents said them. If it's foggy outside, I'll announce that it's a mishty moishty morning, as my father would if he saw it. Any mention of Delaware will have me humming "What did Della wear, boys, what did Della wear?" even though I've no idea how the rest of the song goes, because I know that if you say Delaware to my mother, that's what she'll do. (The state of Delaware doesn't come up much in Irish conversation.)

Sometimes I wonder which of my parents' sayings came from their parents. There must be some. I'd like it if I knew, so I could make a point of passing those ones in particular on to my own children. An oral history family-tree, we'd have.

When my parents came to visit us in Texas we took them to the zoo. When I rounded a corner and saw a bison ahead of us, I whispered to B that if he asked my Dad what that was, he'd say it was a biffalo buffalo bison. Sure enough, those were the first words out of my father's mouth when he saw the hulking shaggy brown creature.

My parents regularly employ the following words without irony: wireless, slacks, plimsolls, the mail boat*, hanky, cardi, serviette. I don't say any of these words, even ironically, because they're not things I need to say, or sometimes because I decided I didn't want to be someone who says "cardi." 

Ireland is another country, and so is the past. My children will be at two removes from these words, and since they don't see their grandparents more than once a year, they're unlikely to remember them unless I do it for them. (My granny would offer me a chocolate from her ubiquitous box - people were always bringing her boxes of chocolates, because old ladies don't need anything - and say "Would a duck swim?" That's the only phrase I have that's uniquely hers in my mind. I wish there were more.)

I always feel that my syntax becomes more mobile when I'm in Ireland, my vocabulary a little more vernacular, my pronouncements more colourful. In America I bland it down, even it out, try not to confuse. I'm sure my friends and neighbours here will tell you that I still sound Irish, that I still say things that leave them scratching their heads on occasion, that I'll never just blend in: nor would I want to. But I feel a certain richness - if I ever had it, and I'm a very mild sort of Irishwoman really, from well inside the Pale - is lost, and maybe my new melting-pot land is the poorer for it. 



*The ferry into Dun Laoghaire from Holyhead; it hasn't brought the mail along with its passengers for many a year, and why it's mail not post I don't know, now I come to think about it. Maybe it was used by the Royal Mail, back in the day.

Perfect two

Years ago, years and years ago, we took a few days in the Wesht of Ireland, and we drove there in my tiny wafer-thin car, and at some point along the road to Clifden, or Roundstone, or somewhere like that, I conjured up our imaginary future children in the back seat and made some brave, foolhardy even, remark about how young Ermingarde and Lavinia would react to whatever nonsense had just been said. Not to mention the little fella. We had to think for the little fella's name, but settled on Murgatroyd, which is the name of a duck, for reasons that are not actually clear to me.

To be honest, I don't even know if Lavinia was Lavinia, though I know Ermingarde was definitely Ermingarde, unless she was Ermintrude.

That was probably the first time we discussed our imaginary offspring. No, that's not true. We first discussed names when we'd been going out only a few months, less than a year, certainly; and at the tender age of not yet 21, that's a long time to be dating and still early on for such weighty discussions. We were in Lisbon, on a bench in the gardens of the Monastery of Jeronimos, I believe, though that's not important; I'm just giving you a sense of place. B had mentioned that he was partial to a particular girl's name, and I commented that, since putting it together with his last name would make the name of a famous film star, that would not be practical. Our friend appeared around the corner just as I was saying, "Well, if we have a girl, I'm not naming her that," and was justifiably a little concerned, no matter how much I reassured her that the whole conversation was extremely hypothetical.

But by the time we were driving to Roundstone it was eight years later and it was all just that little bit less hypothetical, even though at that point our permanent residences were an ocean apart and we hadn't quite figured out how to get around that fact. This was the trip where we both agreed that we wanted to get around it, although it took another 18 months for events to conspire to let that happen. 

And I think it was then, after conjuring Ermingarde and Murgatroyd and their sister, whoever she was, that we agreed that 2.5 was a good number of children. Two and a half. Very sensible, though maybe not entirely practical. Two, with an option on a third, was how we left it.

And thus it stayed, for a long time. But the option has never been taken up, and it's due to expire very soon, if it hasn't already done so. Maybe it's because I can't remember what the other girl was called. Maybe it's because I can't even imagine having another girl or another boy; or not having one or the other. By which I mean, that if a hypothetical third child was a girl, I'd still be sorry about the boy she wasn't. And if it was a boy, likewise.

So I think two is it. And two is perfect, because we have two perfect children, no matter how much and how often they drive us both demented, individually and one at a time, and we want to run away and drink a lot of wine and sleep forever. We'll still keep 'em.


This post is part of a virtual baby shower in honour of two of the Irish bloggers who have welcomed and are about to welcome their own perfect second children. Many congratulations to Aine of (the currently on hiatus) AndMyBaby and Lisa of Mama.ie.

Yesterday's post in the bloghop was by Laura at My Internal World, and tomorrow's will be from Kieran at Go Dad Go.

And today's mystery letter is S.

Spanish-ish dinner

I spent a year in Spain as a student, have I mentioned that before? I must have. I usually describe it as a year "studying", with heavy air quotes, as it took place between my second and third year of college and sufficed to turn my plain old BA degree into a much more high-falutin' BA (Int.). They hadn't quite ironed out the process of the Erasmus year at my home university, though, and told us frankly before we left that though we were quite entitled to take the end-of-year exams in Spain and count them towards our final degree, we'd in all probability do better at home (where our Spanish-literature courses were taken through English, for one thing).

How they thought this would entice us to actually attend classes all year I don't know. I was the most studious of the four from our University, and even I only attended everything I was meant to in the first term, about half my classes after Christmas (the 9.30am modern-literature class was first to go), and nothing at all by summer term. When some members of our department came out to see how we were getting on, at Easter, only one of us was even in town* - and she was the one who'd barely gone to a class at all. She was running a lucrative and enterprising English-language teaching business, but had to employ her considerable acting talents and bullshitting skills to convince the visitors that we were all going to class every day. She may have been rumbled by the end of the night, but at least she got a fancy dinner out of it. (*One had a green card and had gone back to America "early" for the summer, I was sightseeing in Lisbon with some friends, and the third was also in Portugal, busking with an American mate and two guitars.)

Anyway. What I did learn that year, apart from a lot about beer, was to cook for myself. It was the first time I'd lived away from home, and once I stopped going to the university cafeteria, a few of us used to make dinner together every afternoon. We'd make an outing of it and vote on our choice, which almost always came down to creamy pasta or tomatoey pasta. Gradually, however, under the tutelage of someone's Spanish housemates, our repertoire broadened and we learned to make arroz a la cubana, tortilla de patatas, and lentejas (that's lentils). As well as calimocho. (That's cheap red wine mixed with cola.)

Towards the end of the year, when the other foreign students were studing for exams, my fellow Dubliners and I (except the one who'd gone to San Francisco in February) were finding new and delightfully empty bars. One was a little tapas bar called El Cielo (Heaven) where on a Monday night we'd be the only patrons, and the barman (Jesús, of course) would give us a little lesson on how to suck our red wine through the slice of chorizo already in our mouth, to marry the two flavours in the most intense way possible. (We never paid for real tapas, because we had no money to spare. So the free stuff at the bar was all we got, and since this was the centre of Spain rather than the south, a few slices of chorizo and some bread was as much as there was to pick at. If Jesús was feeling generous, he'd even let us have some shavings of jamón serrano and maybe a black olive or two while he polished all the glasses for the second time that day.)

Spanish chorizo is hard to find in the US, especially when people often take chorizo to mean the spicy Mexican sort of uncooked sausage. Spanish chorizo is a type of salami, garlicky and paprika-y, cured and dried and ready to eat - though of course you can fry it up to release some of that delicious fat and make it even tastier. I hadn't cooked with it for an age, but I came across some in our local supermarket last week and decided to invest a few dollars in some memories. It has worked out very well.

Egg and chorizo scramble

First, I fried up a little as a background accent to a pasta and kale dinner. Next I used a little with a scrambled egg and some spinach leaves in a pita pocket for a two-minute lunch. And tonight I used a bit more with chicken and all the spanish flavours I could think of, and the aromas as it simmered transported me back to Valladolid and apparently inspired all that remeniscence you just waded through. So I decided to share it with you, in all its glorious inauthenticity.

About an inch and a half of Spanish chorizo, diced
1 sweet onion, chopped
2 large cloves of garlic (or more), finely chopped
1 chicken breast
3 tablespoons of flour
About half a teaspoon of paprika
1 red bell pepper, chopped
Red wine, about half a glass, perhaps, if you can spare it
1 can of white beans, drained and rinsed
1 can of fire-roasted tomatoes
Good shake of dried oregano
Salt and pepper

First I fried the diced chorizo in a dry pan. Then I stirred in the onion and garlic and let it all soften in the chorizo fat. I put that much in a bowl to one side and added a bit of olive oil to the pan. I mixed the flour and paprika on a plate and tossed the chicken in it before browning it in the pan, and then threw the onion and chorizo back in, along with the red bell pepper. Once all that was hot again, I sloshed in some red wine and inhaled the memories as the alcohol bubbled off. Finally, I added the beans and tomatoes, and some water - about half the capacity of the tomato tin, to pick up the leftovers in there. I sprinkled over a good shake of oregano, some black pepper and about a 1/4 teaspoon of salt, and some red pepper flakes for a little heat. Then I let it all simmer for 20 minutes until the liquid had thickened into a delicious sauce.

You could have it on rice or even with mash, but we just ate it with crusty bread as we had some left over and it works well to mop up the sauce. You could use pork instead of chicken, but you'd probably want to simmer it all for longer, depending on the cut. I won't say it's authentic Spanish food, but it tasted good. I served it on top of some baby spinach leaves, just for extra vitamins and some green.

Of course, if you're not trying to stretch one chicken breast into a healthy dinner for four**, you could just fry the chorizo with the garlic and skip straight to the bread part and put all the wine in your glass, and experiment with sucking the wine through the chorizo in your mouth, and that would be transcendentally glorious too.


** No, of course my children didn't eat this. Even if they didn't have stomach viruses, there's no way on earth they would eat this. So in our house, that's dinner for the grown ups for two nights.

Full circle

When Dash was three and in nursery school, his classroom began getting the kids to "sign in" every morning.

Yes, I know that sounds a bit pushy, but really, it was the lowest of low-key. They would print out a class list with the large letters of each child's name in dots, so that the children just had to find their own and try to trace over it. By the time they started kindergarden, a year and a half later for most of the class, they'd be expected to recognise and write their names - this was just the beginning of a very slow ramping up to that.

Honestly, even the following year at nursery school, signing in was absolutely all the writing they were expected to do - though of course if they wanted to do more, they could, and they did talk about the letters and have a show-and-share (bring in something starting with your assigned letter and tell the class about it) once a week. I love this school and its ethos is all about learning through play.

Anyway, every morning I'd bring three-and-a-half-year-old Dash to school, and his 14-month-old baby sister would grab a pencil and yell "Ning! Ning!" and try her best to sign in along with everyone else. "Ning" meant pen or pencil in Mabel-ese."Ning circle!" she said.

And this week Mabel, in the same classroom, with the same teachers her brother had, started signing in. Because she's a girl (maybe) and because she's six months older than he was in this class (November versus April birthday), she's already pretty good at writing her name, and tracing over the letters was no challenge. Some of the younger boys, I could see, were much closer to where Dash was at that age, just digging the pencil deeply across the line of letters in an angry-looking scribble. That's fine - it's totally age appropriate, and so long as they're learning to know how their name looks by seeing it every morning, it's a start.

But I remember thinking how lovely it would be when Mabel finally got to this stage and was allowed use the ning for its intended purpose, and here we are, and yes, it is.

Not actually signing her name right now

Room in my head

I love trying to bring up a memory that's hidden deep in my mind. I sometimes set out to find one, or to expand one further than I think I know. There's a knack to it, and it doesn't always work, but you have to hook onto a thread of something - from your childhood, probably, when your memory was an open plain to be filled - and tease it out, pulling, pulling, gently, looking around and delving inwards, until you produce a gem that you didn't know was there.

Today I noticed that a particular room I remember has become a location in more than one book I've read. My brain is a theatre filled with dusty sets and props - every now and then a new production pulls out the old stuff again and it's been so long that everyone's forgotten they were used before.

This room was in the home of a friend of my parents. Only children tend to be taken where plural children are not; they are unlikely to create mischief alone in a room full of adults, and given a book or some paper and crayons, can probably entertain themselves for a while; failing that, they can be precocious and entertain the adults while their parents attend a grownup gathering, drink wine in the afternoon, gently flirt with people who are not their spouse while observing their spouse doing the same thing across the room, and pretend that their life hasn't changed all that much.

So while I also visited this room on quiet afternoons with just my mother, what I remember most is tucking myself away in a corner while the adults mingled and jested and nodded and guffawed and tried out this newfangled wine-in-a-box. I remember the Russian dolls that lived in this house, dolls that I was always allowed to play with most carefully, and how the biggest one squeaked painfully every time her belly was wrenched open along its slice to disgorge her daughters and granddaughters and greatgreatgreats. I remember getting to the point where I would seek out my mother and pull her sleeve and ask, "Pleeeease can we go now?"

I think I remember, too, curling up on the spare bed in the front bedroom, with its soft black woollen coverlet of some sort of holey 70s knitting, and going to sleep there during an occasional evening party; at the end of which my parents would just hoist me up, toss me in the back seat of the car, and drive home. I do remember how the streetlights looked from my horizontal position, cosy in my sleeping bag, watching them flick past against the black; restful orange or bright white, hurting my eyes and sending out spears of light when I squinted.

And then we'd turn into the second-last road and then there'd be a sharp corner and I could always tell our hill by the gradient, as gravity pushed me against the join where the bottom of the seat met the back. Then a quick swing around (my father was quite the rally driver) and the same again as he backed down the steep driveway to the hidden carport at the back of the house.

And then I'd be picked up and I'd pretend to be asleep, and I'd be fireman-carried into the house and up the bumpy stairs and plopped into my own bed under the eaves, under the wooden ceiling, where I belonged.