Jersey Shore Bound

This weekend we are headed down to the Jersey Shore.  My grandmother wrote Myles and Fiona a letter formally inviting them to come and celebrate Memorial Day weekend, even though it is something we do every year. At the end of her letter she tried to prepare them for how different the town might appear to their eyes. "You will be surprised, at how things have changed after the Sandy flood came."  This startled me, and I realized that I had yet to eyewitness the devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to the land of my family in Southern Jersey.  When we were young, every summer we counted down the days till we traveled to my mother's childhood home.  And now, I am able to bring my children there to experience the things that we all greatly savored.  The water pump, the barn filled with treasures, Mr. Gopher's private entrance to his burrow under the shed, watching Frankenstein, memorizing Robert Lewis Stevenson poems. The ocean. But most of all we couldn't wait for the boardwalk.  In the car this week I heard a Here and Now bit about the Jersey Shore readying for summer after Hurricane Sandy.  They interviewed Brian Donohue after he had produced a short documentary on the heartache and dilemma of this unique vacationing region. It is called, 'Splinters & Sand'.  It moved me deeply. Although our boardwalk in Ocean City did not sustain the damages as other Jersey boardwalks did. I still feel anxious about what it will look like. We will go and check on things. Try and spend as much money at Mac and Manco's as possible. 4 birch beers. 1 large pie (pizza.) And hopefully Wonderland will still be running the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Carousel.  My grandfather would force us all to ride the carousel, well into our teens, no matter how much we protested. It was a tradition. And I will attempt to carry it on.

I will leave you with a poem that was pounded into my head as a child 15 miles inland on the back porch of this house. We would stand before everyone, forced to recite, The Swing, by Robert Lewis Stevenson.

The Swing

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside--

Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown--
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!

My grandfather calls himself the 'Herring Town Poet' and creates beauties like this.

Spring Forward

Spring forward into doom. Or that is how this morning went. Blame it on the time change. Blame it on fear, but this morning I ever so accidentally called my seven year old son "an idiot." I watched the words flow out of my mouth and hang there in a word balloon. The back story was a morning filled with bickering and arguing. We had just picked up Gracie the family dog Sunday night from my dad, and everyone wanted to hold the leash. Fiona was also complaining that we weren't going the route of her liking so when we turned the corner to appease her, Gracie sees another dog tied up in a driveway and she bolts over to get a sniff, Myles dropping the leash in the process. And that's when it happened.  The dog was a pit bull. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But I had had an earlier encounter with this dog unleashed in which he charged at Fiona and I walking home one day. The charge was a bluff, and he ended up just checking out some bushes nearby, but still, I had painted many a harrowing scene with things going differently. I could not remember.  Do you play dead when a dog attacks you? Or do you wave a big stick and roar like a bear? So as idiot left my mouth, what I really meant was that I was the idiot to let Fiona decided which way we walked and to let Myles hold the leash on a street where I knew there was a ferocious dog. As the shock of my name calling echoed in my mind beside the bloody images of a dog fight that I was unable to prevent, (I did know from Henry Huggins and Ribsy that a water hose can work to separate snarling dogs. Beverly Cleary has taught me so much) the dog turned out to be sweet, and friendly, and mildly arthritic. Poor thing. So after my lecture, on how bad that scene could have been. I gathered up my courage to tell Myles that I was sorry for calling him an idiot and that I was just really scared. He accepted my apology like a champ. Replay, after I called him an idiot he quickly retorted in the midst of it all, "I am not an idiot!" You can't get him down easily. In fact maybe I did him a favor. Maybe I have given him an obstacle to overcome. Maybe he will decide to change the world. I hope. The more likely scenario is that he will start calling Fiona that. Steps backward hurt.  I am hoping some butter, flour, and sugar will get things back on track. Baking band-aids I'm really good at.

Victory occured on March 8, 2013 when Myles and I finished The Fellowship of the Ring.  I fought through many nights of, "But I want to read with Daddy!!"  Can't you see we are bonding here! As a result, we grew to love that band of brothers.  Sam Gamgee made us laugh countless times, and Gimli is our bud. Regret: I really wish I had not had Elijah Wood's high pitched scream in my head while reading this. 

In other news I found a poetry book to match my yarn. Beautiful. My awesome neighbor is teaching me to knit. The European way. When you see those colors do you think Italian children? That's what I am going for atleast. Hey, we have a Sicilian great grandfather so its not all a show!

Leave Your Sleep

This might verge on blasphemy, but Natalie Merchant's Leave Your Sleep is the modern answer to Robert Louis Stevenson's A Children's Garden of Verse.  Perhaps she herself realized this and politely nodded to him by opening with 'The Land of Nod.' This collection of classic children's poetry is just wonderful.   Merchant released the album Leave Your Sleep a couple years ago, and now it is beatufully illustrated by the amazing Barbara McClintock.  Merchant describes this as the most ambitious project she has ever attempted.  It shows.  We owe much to her hard work as we are whirled away by poetic magic. It comes complete with a CD, for there is one song for each poem in the book.  Our family favorite is Bleezer's Ice-Cream with its hilarious list of twenty-eight divine creations. Cocoa Mocha Macaroni is at the top.