Melsville

Some Good Things and Why They Are Good

I just ate a plate of latkes at Rene’s Cafe.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I love potato pancakes.  That Rene’s keeps some kind of potato pancakes on the menu is one of the reasons I love it.

The best thing about Rene’s Cafe isn’t the potato pancakes of the eggs Benedict.  Liam and I go to Rene’s together on the Monday mornings when he’s home while Emma is at pre-school.  As soon as his side order of bacon hits the table, he attacks it; it might even be gone by the time his pancakes arrive.  I sit across from him, slowly eating veggie eggs benny. Liam can’t understand why I would replace the canadian bacon with spinach and tomato slices, and he can’t believe how slowly I eat.

Liam and I talk about stuff.  He tells me about his classmates.  I tell him about Mahatma Gandhi, and we agree that his birthday should be a holiday.  We discuss Harry Portter;  why everyone might rather that Percy Weasly  died in place of  Fred but that maybe it had to be Fred.   The best thing about Rene's is that, at Rene’s don’t rush their patrons.  The best thing about Rene’s is that Liam and I can stay and talk. as long as we want.

A writing challenge for the Winter is going to be to write a piece of Harry Potter fan-fiction.  When I’ve finished a story about George Weasly, I’ll give it to Liam, so we can talk about it over breakfast at Rene’s.

The Campbell /  O’Keefes have made pacts with the Campbells  and the Bendas; this Christmas, we are shopping only for the kids.  I love shopping for children, particularly at Christmas.  I like it because I do it in person.  I spend time in Porter Square Books  looking at the picture books  and seeing the illustrations for myself and reading the first pages of novels. I enjoy talking to the salespeople and finding out what books they recommend.   I walk up Mass Ave to a real  toy store; one where the toys are displayed in interesting ways.  These are toys that a buyer selected, toys that look like fun.  I might even get to see a toy out of the box, to see what it feels like, how a kid would play with it.  The salespeople can talk about the the toys because they know what they are selling. 

I like shopping in small stores because people working in these stores are sure of what they sell.  People who work in stores don’t get paid poorly to pack and ship boxes.  I like shopping in stores because I realize how much  I’m actually buying and how much it actually costs.  I like shopping in stores because going to the store is an event.

Yes, I do buy presents on-line.  When I’m buying CDs, computer gear or hard-to-find books, it makes sense.   For years, our route has been covered by the same UPS man, and I like him.  He carried boxes in for me when I was pregnant and shouldn’t have lifted things.  He came to our house twice in one day so he could bring me a late-arriving package two days before Christmas. He always calls me “Mrs. O’Keefe”, and I don’t let many people do that.

Last week, I took my First-Level Kung Fu test.  Instructor Karen reviewed my test.  When we scheduled the test, she tried to put me at ease saying, “I’ll be reviewing the test; it’s only me.  Only you Karen, the incredible woman who was still leading kids’ classes and two days before her son was born, only you Karen, who, cute as you are could probably snap somebody in half.


What makes Karen ( and Jonathan, and Marc, but I’m talking about Karen today), s o great is that she knows how to help me and when to leave me alone. When I was working my way through the Long Fist and Southern Fist forms,  I barely noticed her at all.  I felt like I was all alone working.  Full of purpose and all alone.

With Karen’s help, I proved a few things .  Because I wasn’t trying to keep up with a roomful of people while Jonathan counted out ten side-kicks on either side,  I could do them a little better (not much better, I will always hate side-kicks) if I did them slowly.  Because Karen insisted that I take more time with it, I realized that I actually do a passable snap kick with my left leg.  I can pull either leg up to my chest and stand there; I didn’t know that.

She’s the tough one, Karen is.  She doesn't modify moves for me as often as Marc ot Jonathan do.  Now, I adore Instructor Jonathan, don’t imagine that I don’t, but I think I still scare him.  Small women with Cerebral Palsy probably scare lots of able-bodied men.  I’m not sure that Jonathan has ever gotten over the fear that I was going to fall over and break something.

Last night, Jonathan lead the class.  I hadn’t seen him in maybe a month,  and his classes always are fun.  I walked home though the cold dark, with a few snowflakes swirling in the air.  I’m not crazy about the wind, but it’s almost Christmas, so it should be snowing.

I woke up this morning wishing for the tiny apple pies my mother always made; cups of pastry filled with homemade chunky applesauce and big dollops of whipped cream.   I missed those, and the sausage rolls and the many-layered wonder of Christmas trifle  Mama always made.  Her trifle recipe left the world when she did,  so here comes my yearly effort at making something like it.  One week before Christmas Eve, it’s good to miss these things.

What's Hanging on YOUR Tree

In the days when Christmas was enforced as the primary Winter holiday, Christmas ornaments were a yearly were classroom projects.   Skeins  of yarn, rolls of shiny paper, stacks of popsicle sticks, and blizzards of glitter, the y became stars,, circles and bells.  I also remember making an angle out of a gold paper cup, a paper doilies and a tiny Styrofoam sphere; for years, she topped our Christmas trees.   

My mother saved home-made decorations, although she always hoped that some would vanish somewhere between the basement boxes and the tree.  Some were so old that we  had forgotten who made it, or even what it used to be.

Such was the case wit the Xmas Lozange.   Made out of melted yellow plastic, a foreboder of the melty beads, it was long and shiny.  Because its texture was gravely, I thought that the plastic had never melted properly.  As the years past, we all agreed it was butt-ugly, and neither my brother Jonathan nor I took responsibility for it.  He blamed me, but I absolutely know that he created the Xmas Lozange.   The last time we our families gathered to the tree with my mother, all admitted we hated it, and the Xmas Lozange hit the trash.

My mother made ornaments as well.  She sewed them out of felt,  She made the classics, the tree, the Santa, the stockings the teddy-bears and the reindeer, and she made ones that made sense only to the four of us;  who would decorate her tree with a felt Sherlock Holmes except the youngest member of the Friends of Irene Adler?


Like most of his family, Liam makes things.  Three years ago, he built a home for my Yoda figure.  It sits on my desk an intentionally-lopsided hut, so perfect for the squat green Jedi.  Right now, he has a business building habitats for the beastie-shaped pencil-topping erasers that are popular with his classmates.  Demand is now so high that Liam and his fellow builders  have needed to fire their sales-people.  Liam may make himself obsolete because, since kids pay Liam and his friends in erasers, they may eventually be the only ones who have any.

This weekend, I am planning a trip to Pearl Art Supplies in Central Square.  Bypassing the alluring aisles of chalk pastels,  I’ll head strait for the craft supplies in the basement.  Felt, Popsicle sticks, melty beads and anything that sparkles, I’m planning to come home with some of everything.  The art-students buying brushes and fixative upstairs may wish they were going home  to make Christmas Jedi.

Anyone who wants to see the most beautiful patch of sidewalk in Somerville should come by my house.  Bring a camera, you aren’t going to see its equal on your street, my street, or any other.   Any day now, it could be jackhammered into rubble, so you have no time to lose.

Two months ago, this panel of pavement was  the scene of some bleeding and bone-breaking that just had not happened.  Tree roots had broken the slab into pieces and pushed the pieces eighteen inches off the pavement.  Elderly men taking their dogs on their morning constitutionals stopped me on my way home from  taking Emma to pre-school and told me I should call the city and tell them to fix it.   The lady from across the street was very good at telling me what could go wrong if I didn’t get it fixed.    She didn’t want anything bad to happen to  me or the kids.  “Call the Mayor and tell him he has to fix it.  Tell him you’re sick and that you have two kids.”

She was the one who told me what might have happened one night in August.  “Some lady fell in front of your house last night.  I think something happened; she broke something, fractured something, I don’t know.  You call the Mayor and get that sidewalk fixed.”

I never needed to speak with the Mayor.  I called my Alderman and I identified myself as many ways as I could I was a Somerville homeowner, a voter in his district, I was a mother with two young kids and a person with Cerebral Palsy and a seizure disorder.  I was all of these things, and I needed my sidewalk fixed.  Someone had fallen in front of my house, might have broken something;  I needed that sidewalk fixed.  It was up to the city to fix it.

Within fifteen minutes, the Alderman was in front of the house, work order in his hand, waiting for the DPW.   Accident waiting to happen, they agreed.

Two weeks later, our neighbours were in awe of our smooth, flat  sidewalk.   There are  cracks and pits all up and down the street,  but the panel in front of my house is pristine. 


Last week, the builders told us that if we wanted the extenuation work on our house to include a full second bathroom and a half-bath, we will need to put in a larger pipe to carry water to the house.  This means the sidewalk in front of our house needs to be dug up, wrecked.   After that’s done, we’ll be replacing it at our own expense. 

So my local friends, come and marvel at this monument to telling the city of Somerville what needs to be done.    Enjoy it while you can.

A Trip to the Bookstore

After dropping Emma off at Pre-school,  I practically ran to the subway station.  Nothing was getting in the way of me and Porter Square Books.  I was on a mission, and nothing would stop me.

Even being in the subway gave me a thrill.  Just having somewhere to go, excited me. I was going to go to the bookstore and buy two copies of The Grapes of Wrath; one to replace the decrepit library copy which was past overdue and unfinished.  The second unblemished copy was for me to finished at me leisure.  I also intend to sit in the cafe and eat a triple-berry scone with my coffee. Hunger had settled over me, I needed that scone.  I wanted to enjoy my breakfast before I needed it too much.  To the subway!!

On the subway-platform,  across the tracks, I noticed a placard telling of a local production of The Taming of the Shrew.  From the blue-on-blue tangle of images and words, Katerina glowered alluring; half come-hither glance, half-dare-you-to-cross-this-line glare.  It worked on me, I already yearned to go.   Live theatre? Shakespeare?; yeah Baby! I wondered if my Mother-in-law could take the kids some night and let Jamie and I go.

In his theater-days, my father had played Pertrcchio in a Belfast production.  As an actor, Daddy was made for Shakespeare's comedies; he had perfect comic timing and the look of a handsome character-actor.  Daddy had crazy red-hair and was nowhere near tall.  He played Petrichio in heeled boots and risers because he wasn’t taller enough than his leading-lady / foil. 

The  Belfast Shakespeare Company missed a chance they should have taken; that’s what I think.  How would it have looked, I wonder if Katerina was well and truly taller than her suitor?  What could the cast do with that?  We’ll never know.

As I walked to the bookstore, I recalled a college classmate who had been much under-used by the Vassar Drama Department.  Frankly short, Sheldon had Crayola-orange hair that fell, poker-straight down the middle of his back. He also looked very young, and wore roundy wire glasses.  When the Drama Department mounted a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Sheldon finally got the attention he deserved.  He played Puck, and he filled the whole stage looking like a man loving every minute of his star-turn.  After the first performance, the audience all told their friends to go because everybody had to see Sheldon.

A few nights before the first show, Sheldon had to get a Drama Department haircut.   His fabulous hair was loosely braided, and the braid cut off,  There were sad women on the Vassar campus the next morning. 

Once I’d gotten ordered my  muffin, I saw a book on a table that I knew I had to buy.  It was called Belfast’s Ghosts, and the cover declared it an impressive first novel and a taut thriller.  Taught thriller; that suggested that it was about “The Troubles”, which is not exactly what I wanted it to be.  I wanted a book to tell the reader about Belfast, the antique gem, the place my young father thought of as the cool, big city.  I wanted people to read about a Belfast that didn’t blow up.  I knew that such a place existed.

My friend, Marguerite, has family in Israel.  She knows what it’s like to have family somewhere you see as dangerous and unpredictable.  When I was a teenager, visiting my grandparents in Northern Ireland,  a girl at some kind of protest, march or “disturbance” died after being hit by a rubber-tipped bullet.  All other news stopped.  It became the only thing, the worst thing happening anywhere.  When I returned to Boston, I called my boyfriend and assured him my family and I were all okay.  He had no idea what I was talking about.  Northern Ireland rarely makes the American news.   When it does, it’s never good.  Always early in the morning, and never again that day, National Public Radio tells me that there have been shootings.  I just lie in my bed cursing and crying; oh my people, stop it, stop it.

Before I even picked up the book, I heard about something else I desperately wanted to see.  The Somerville Theatre would be screening  A Hard Day’s Night on Sunday.  I was already dying to go, but this time I wanted to bring the kids.  I wanted them to see a Beatles made without Peter Max animation.  Goofy, over-the-top and even then understated; I wanted to give the kids a treat.  I wanted them to appreciate it.  My kids have senses of humour, and I want to give them some credit.

I’m so glad I went to that bookstore.  Three cultural shots, straight up, I’m dizzy but I want more.  I’ll start the new book today, The Grapes of Wrath will keep.   I want to go to the theatre, or even a movie, but I might have to settle for knowing others are seeing them.  Wanting is a rush, but it’s not enough.

Back to Melsville

I’m sure that all my readers are bored of hearing this, but I’ll tell you one more time.  Since November is National Write a Month month, I’m giving it a go.  It’s that simple.  I’m not going to bore you with the details; I want to tell you that I’m working.  I also want you to know that I’m not moving out of Melsville.  You’ll actually be hearing more from me.

Everyone also knows that I practice Kung Fu twice a week, right?   Each class starts with twenty or so minutes of stretches, jumping jacks, push- ups and standing very still until it hurts.  Each class opens with punching into the air and kicking at nothing.  After every class, I take a one-mile walk home through the colder-and-colder dark.  By the time I get home, I’m loose, tired, wide awake and thrilled.

I want to  make Melsville the warm-up.  My fifty jumping jacks and 100 toe-touches, this will be where I start, or end.  Melsville could be that bracing, let-it-go walk at the end of the night. 

My life is my life, this novel is not.  Here,  you’ll be hearing about what happens in my life.

By the end of this month, I will have also passed my Level Two Test in Kung Fu class.  Oh yeah, and construction should be underway on the house in the next few weeks.  November is shaping up to be one packed month.

Out of the City

Liam is gone.  He’s hit the wilderness.  Will the wilderness ever be the same?

Sometime after 8:00 am.,  on Monday buses pulled away from the Arthur D. Healy  School, bearing  nine-and-ten-year olds off to something called Nature’s Classroom in Rhode Island.  Those must have been noisy buses, packed to capacity with kids, all excited to go.  They'd all heard stories from older kids, and now it was their turn.

Liam knew that he’ll need some waterproof boots for splashing in streams, and he knew that, on the trip two years ago, the kids dissected a small shark.    Stream or shark,  I don’t know which idea thrilled him more, streams or shark, but he wanted to take it all in.

You’ve got to understand something; Liam is a city kid.  He was born in a North-eastern city, and he’ll live here until it’s time for college.  Stars don’t shine to brightly through the Somerville smog.  Liam loves  frogs and snakes, and he’s seen them,  as part of school projects.  One time in August, we saw an eagle perched on the roof on the Foodmaster; now that’s wildlife!

Now, I know Somerville nine-year-old boys.   I know what they read, how they play, how they talk.  I know what matters to them.  And another thing I know is that only two fourth-graders of my acquaintance walk any further than around the corner without an adult to lead them.   

These children are out there now, with two pairs of sneakers apiece. They have a week’s worth of underwear and socks  We’ve packed them  shirts to layer over shirts to layer over shirts , rain boots,, boots with treads,  slickers and gallons of Purel.  A parent whose child went on the last trip suggested that kids bring plastic bread-bags for kids to wear between=n their boots and shoes to keep their feet dry, so every kid has those.  Liam also has two disposable cameras and a notebook too, and I  hope he uses them.

Monday night, we got the call I know that other parents were dreading.   Around  10 pm, Liam’s teacher called to tell us that Liam had thrown up his dinner.   Rich food, she said, it he might have thrown up because the food was pretty heavy.  Liam had no fever, but nobody could be sure of anything.  We might have to come in the morning and pick him up, but we wouldn’t know until morning.
 
Jamie talked to Liam.  He said our son sounded like a tired kid who had just puked; it was that simple.

I did almost cry.  I did want to carry him home and take care of him, but that’s not the only reason I almost cried.

I’ll tell you one thing about my boy, he’s a puker.  He’s been throwing up on me for ten years, so  I know that it’s just the way he gets sick.    Once it’s over, an hour later he might be feeling bouncy.   I’m the same way, so I’m used to it; vomit doesn’t phase me. 

What worried me was that he would be feeling fine in the morning and still get bundled off home.   Two days in the house with a boy who had been robbed of  splashing, shark-dissecting, and boy-craziness etc. wouldn’t bee any fun for anybody.

Jamie talked to  one of the trip chaperones Tuesday  morning.  No fever, no cough, no rash; Liam would be staying!

I talked to Liam an hour later, and he still sounded depleted.  He didn’t know what was for breakfast, and he wasn’t sure how much he’d eat.  He’d seen a whole field covered in frost this morning, and that was the most amazing thing.  Maybe city kids have little to compare a frosty field against, or maybe it was an amazing thing.  I can’t wait to hear more.

He’s coming home today.   Monday night might have fixed him in Choice Program lore  as “The Kid Who Puked at Nature’s Classroom”, but I don’t think that matters.  I hope the trip was worth having to have nausia sweep in  100 + miles from home.  Who knows, “The Boy Who Puked” might be the hero of the trip; you can never tell with boys.

Liam's Test

Hungry and worn out from a buddy’s birthday party, Liam Sunday last night that today he would be expected to demonstrate all the kung-fu forms he’d spent the last four years studying, even the ones he now took for granted.    Panic, absolute panic arose.  Suddenly, he said, it was all gone. 

Liam and I walked out onto the deck, and I told him what I so often told myself in kung-fu class.   He knew all the steps, I said, his body had them.  All he had to do was to practice until he’d brought them all out. 

Maybe he believed me because after practicing he said that yes, it was starting to come back to him.  Sunday night, practicing included running to his friend Zakwani’s house for a short tutorial on Eight-Kick Form.  Zak can kick higher and better than any other kid I know, so it’s a good thing he could take some  time to help out his old friend.

Do I think that Liam felt ready on Monday afternoon to take the test that would earn him the rank of Purple Belt Star?  No, I know that he didn’t feel ready.  At camp the past  week, he told me, there had never been the time to revisit the old forms.  All I could say was that he should ask Instructor Mark some time to practice before starting the test.  I kept telling him that he had all steps and that his body knew what it was doing.  I think he believed me.

The classroom had never looked so empty as it did when Liam and I walked down the stairs.  It looked twice the size that I knew it was.  Liam said that he was ready for the test, and asked if he could take a few minutes to practice Dragon Form, the first form all the kids learn.   Five minutes, Mark said he could practice until the test began in five minutes.

I sat against the rock wall, in one of the mismatched chairs set aside for parents. Liam thought he had only a few things to practice, and Mark started him on the first steps of Dragon Form.  Step by step until he got it right and then again until he did it better.  I sat forward in my seat and watched, trusting that he would be ready for the test when it began.

Alone, all alone, Liam sweated through the longest five minutes of his Summer.  Without the 1 eighteen other kids from his Kung Fu class Liam had the entire practice floor to fill.  One kid in a big  room with mirrors on the front and back walls.  He jumped, punched, kicked and said not a word.  If he made a mistake, he just corrected himself and kept practicing.

But this wasn’t practice, it was the test.  Mark told me this while we watched.  Liam was doing so well, but he was nervous;  not telling him that the test had begun was just the right thing to do.

When Mark called him over to his desk and told him that the test was over,  Liam’s hair was plastered to his head and his face glowed pink.  His eyes were bright and he just kept smiling.  Even while I told him that he had to practice treating his parents with greater respect before he’d get the chance to test for his Red Belt; that he’d need to listen better, to stop teasing his sister before their game stopped being funny and not to need to be asked to do something many times before doing it.   Liam kept smiling.   He should have that Red Belt this Winter.

More on Summer Reading

Two weeks ago, Liam’s  teacher, Ms. Clapham, sent her students a letter.  She was, she wrote,   hiking in Oregon and visiting family and friends.  Yes, Liam and I agreed with our mother-son team buds Sarah and Isaiah, that was how we imagined Ms. Clapham spending her vacations. Hearty old bird that she was, we all thought she would be hiking, frame backpack on her back, though the mountains.  Perhaps she would take a day to paddle a canoe upriver; Ms. Clapham was probably enjoying every moment of her Summer.  And she should.

Before stiking forth on her holiday, Ms. Clapham sent the kids home with a Reading  Bingo grid.  In each square of the grid, she wrote down a type of book,; Mystery, Non-Fiction, Fiction, Poetry, etc.  Student should make it there goal, s he said,  to rack up five in a row on their grids.   I like this because it insists that kids try reading new things rather than limit themselves to Parts VI-X of sagas they’ve already started.

This Summer, at least two friends  facebook-sent me a list of  one hundered books that The Powers That Be at the BBC have decreeded to be important but of which “most people” had read only six.  The list is, as you’d expect, heavy with the VIPs of Brit Lit (Shakespere, Austin, Dickens and others), features some Americans, but not many.  I don’t think that the list included Faulkner, whose work I love or Hemmingway, with whom I’d been briefly tortured.   Twain, was also abscent;  where was that mysterious stranger?  “The Mysterious Stranger,” who has read Twain’s short story? You’ll be surprised.

Try it, you may like it.  Ms.  Clapham is way past cooler than the BBC.   I can remember little (if any) poetry on their list.  Biography, autobiography, non-fiction,  Ms. Clapham offers these to her young readers, but the BBC cares only little if anyone has read them.    If they were included, more readers might challange themselves and sample genres they had been avoiding.

While I’m not about to hand my copy of  “The Autobiography of Malcom X.”  to a ten-year-old,  I’d be thrilled if he did cloose to read it when he when he’s older.   There are book that people may know exist,  but never read.   By giving different kinds of books a try while he’s young,  he may not back away from books that give readers a little push.

Ms. Clapham included comic books on her board of genres  from which the kids can pick.  Thank you Ms. C.,  this week, while Liam reads a biography of Alexander the Great, I’ll be taking on “Watchmen.”  Started it once, time for another try.

The Muffin Cycle

"Wednesday Morning"

Child’s trike tripped me
Before muffin. Thud! Dense pain
Kung-Fu class?  That’s “no!”

"Wednesday Night"

Rene, Isaiah
Liam’s nutty pals sleep
over.  Boy noise  night.

"Thursday Morning"

Em, thrilled offers
Co-Co Puffs to bro’s  guests.
They ask for muffins

Bits and Bobs

As did her brother before her, and their parents before both of them,  Emma loves the CD Yellow Submarine .  She doesn’t go on and on about what the songs mean.  Wee Em just sings what she hears.  The Liverpudlian accents  muddle her  a little, but she does sing; her current favorite is the one she calls, “Baby, On a Ritz Bat” ( “Baby, You’re a Rich Man” to the rest of us ).  That, and my girlie singing “Hey Bulldog” is the sound of cute running straight at surreal , and passing right  through it.

In June, I wrote that I hoped Liam would draw animae and start learning to play guitar this Summer.   It’s July, and Liam keeps wood and carving-tools in an old tackle-box in his room.    This weekend at Art Beat,  Liam pleaded for a bamboo flute, which I bought him.   Earlier that week, he stood surrounded by the used guitars in Rockin’ Bob’s Guitar Stop” and told me that he really wanted to play the flute   Any music is music enough for me.

Maybe I’m the one who  learn to play the for-string bass.    After I gain   a firmer hold on Long-fist Form, once I can say I walk an extra 3 miles on purpose, then I’ll consider music lessons.  Small goals, but mine own.