Shaken, Not Stirred

I have just finished cleaning up… I don’t know… how many ounces are in a magnum bottle of vodka?… off my kitchen floor. Along with the glass in which it used to be held.

This is how that looked.

                                I haz a sad.

It’s basically how the week went, embodied in the cruel denial of all those drinks that now occupy space in my dish towels, grout, and the area under the refrigerator I can’t reach.Twenty dollars’ worth of probably-not-high-quality-but-eminently-drinkable freezer-stored distilled fermented wheat (not potato) byproduct is now seeping into every crevice it can find and getting the housebugs drunk instead of getting in mah belleh whenever required. It was the only alcohol I had in the house, since I broke up with the wine club over its refusal to come to my house because some law meant it couldn’t cross state lines, so I always had to go pick it up somewhere else. Made me feel dirty.

This week, you guys.

I feel sure that you will all understand that at least half the reason we blog is because it gives us the freedom to write what we choose in the manner and time we choose. Though writing is a significant portion of my professional life, I am nonetheless constrained to write the way my professional superiors feel is best. And I understand that, even though a web feature piece I felt strongly about and constructed with a real-life character and real-life conflict set up by said character got dismantled when the web content manager (who is great at copy editing and proofreading, but not so good at recognizing how to tell a story) banished the character to the sixth paragraph in favor of literality and deleted entirely the quote that set up the conflict which would be resolved throughout the rest of the piece. A piece, now, that resolves a conflict to which readers have not been introduced.

My VP approved the edit because my version “was more New Yorker, and the edited version is more USA Today.” I get that. I get that the audience for which I have to write is not necessarily the audience for which I want to write, and her observation was valid and one that I will keep in mind going forward. But it was nonetheless disappointing in light of all the time and energy I had spent developing, crafting and writing the piece, and in the way I had interviewed the subjects in pursuit of that concept—a concept, I should add, that the web content editor had known from the beginning.

Add to that a major publication blunder, a bunch of misplaced frustration heaped onto my shoulders by others, a raft of relatively unimportant but highly time-consuming tedium and some internal personal oodginess, and you have a week of Suck that leaves yours truly feeling torn between fair questions about ego vs. effort and unfair assessments about worth.

There was some good news. Some Best Possible News that redeemed the week at least in part.

Amanda’s first restaging scans since her Stage IV metastatic triple-negative breast cancer diagnosis came back showing significant reduction in cancer activity.

It is the best possible thing she could have heard. It means, for the first time in four and a half months, she can breathe. She can, for about two more months, stop worrying that the chemo wasn’t working.

It makes me feel a little silly about being mad that my vodka bottle shattered and ruined about 20 future cocktails.

Still… if anyone needs me, I’ll be over here…sucking on a dish towel with my hand in a jar of olives.

Flowers Are Red

Twin Nephs started first grade on Thursday. They were blithely dismissive of the fact that there must have been some sort of mistake and they must still only be about three years old. They were excited to get school supplies—well, alright, Neph 1 was excited—and bore the burdens of heavy backpacks well on Day One, as evidenced in the photos I received. But along with all this excitement came not only the usual tinge of sadness for us grown-ups, but a little extra kick in the head. And not the way Sinatra would mean it.

Sister 1 took Neph 1 (Neph 2 chose to stay at home) and her mother-in-law to the store to get the supplies listed in the emails the boys’ respective teachers had sent. There was a distinct difference between these lists, I’m told. Neph 2’s teacher requested the usual stuff: four folders, a few sharpened No. 2 pencils (awwww, remember No. 2 pencils?), a pencil box, crayons, markers, paper, etc. Neph 1’s teacher, on the other hand, was much more precise.

• 12 No 2. pencils, sharpened
• 12 No. 2 pencils, unsharpened

(“Can I get a pencil sharpener?!” Neph 1 excitedly asked. Sister 1 and her mother-in-law looked at the list.

“Sorry, honey. Not on the list.”

Cue minor dejection.)

• 1 pencil box, primary color
• 4 folders: red, green, yellow, blue – no other colors

(“Mom, what about this one?!” asked Neph 1, holding up his favorite color: orange.

Sister 1 checked the list again. “Nope. Can’t be orange. Sorry.”

Cue rolled eyes.)

• 1 marble composition notebook – black and white only (awww, remember marble composition notebooks?)

(“‘Com…poh…sssih…’ I found a composition notebook, Mom!” exclaimed Neph 1, proudly holding it up. 

Sister 1 wrinkled her nose. “Sorry, buddy. That one’s purple. It has to be black and white.”

“But I like purple!” Neph 1 declared, wide-eyed and smiling with remaining hope.

“I know. Sorry.” My sister frowned for him.

Cue big sigh.

“I hope I wasn’t this tough on my students’ parents,” remarked the mother-in-law, a retired elementary school teacher.)

• 1 eraser, pink, rectangular
• 2 1″ binders, black
• 1 16-pack Crayola crayons, standard colors
• 1 8-pack regular size (not fat) Crayola markers, primary colors

…et cetera.

Neph 1 was still enthusiastic despite having some creative hopes dashed during the shopping trip. So was Sister 1, who was later photographed sitting at the kitchen table with her label maker, carefully branding all the kids’ stuff with their names. Amazingly, she did not label the kids themselves.

At a family get-together a day or so later, Sister 1 was telling a cousin, Callie, this story. Callie is a third grade teacher. She explained that she bets Neph 1’s teacher is older, more experienced, and more structured, while Neph 2’s teacher is probably younger and less organized. “By the time I get them in my class, I can tell which teacher they had in first grade,” she said. “The kids who had the tougher, structured teachers are more organized by the time they’re in third grade.”

My sister realized she’d forgotten to get Neph 1 the hand sanitizer from the list. Brother-In-Law 1 ran out on a quick trip to grab it, and, since there were no rules listed about what kind of sanitizer it had to be, he grabbed a bottle with an orange cap. It turned out to be peach scented stuff. Which thrilled my nephew. Less so, my brother-in-law.

I called the boys at 7:15 a.m. on their first day. My sister was combing their hair before sending them downstairs to get breakfast. “I’m going to do my hair sideways, because I think my teacher will like it,” said Neph 1. (“Do my hair sideways” means “part it on the side.”) He likes to impress people. He and his brother chatted to me energetically via speakerphone about how they get to ride the bus and how Neph 1 knows one other child in his class already but Neph 2 doesn’t know anybody in his. Neph 1 was giddy as he told me, “I get to have my own hand sanitizer! And it smells like peaches!” I’m telling you, it really doesn’t take a lot to make this kid happy. Realizing that they probably weren’t chewing their nutritious breakfast while they were talking to me, I wrapped up the conversation and let them prep their bellies for a day of learning.

That night, I got a message from my sister. She’d come home from work and asked the boys how their first day of first grade went. Unsurprisingly, my darling, exuberant, people-pleasing, sensitive, curious, purple-and-orange-loving, peach-scented godson piped up first.

“Well, I had a GREAT day!,” he told her. “I only got two time-outs—”

“Two time-outs?!” my sister cried. “On the first day?! What did you do?”

Neph 1 screwed up his face in a classic expression he may have inherited from his favorite aunt. “I talked. I talk a lot, Mom.”

He may have inherited that from me, too.

“And do you know what?” he continued with vivacity. “Did you know that you’re not allowed to sing in class?”

He turned and looked sadly out the window.

“Today I learned that you’re not allowed to sing in class,” he finished.

Well. I went all Harry Chapin “Flowers Are Red” about it. Do you know the song? It’s about a little boy who goes to school all excited and starts coloring a picture, and the teacher says, “What are you doing?” and the boy says he’s painting flowers, and the teacher says, “It’s not the time for art, young man. And anyway, flowers are green and red.” She lectures this boy: “Flowers are red, young man. Green leaves are green. There’s no need to see flowers any other way than the way they always have been seen.”

But the little boy says, “There are so many colors in a rainbow, so many colors in the morning sun, so many colors in a flower, and I see every one!”

And the teacher says, “You’re sassy.” And after he argues again, she puts him in a corner, where he gets lonely, and he goes to the teacher and tells her she was right, that flowers are red and green leaves are green, and there’s no need to see flowers any other way than the way they always have been seen.

Then the boy’s family moves to another town and he goes to a new school and the teacher is smiling and says, “There are so many colors in a flower, so let’s use every one!” But do you know what the little boy does? He paints all the flowers green and red. And when the teacher asks him why, he says, “Flowers are red, and green leaves are green. There’s no need to see flowers any other way than the way they always have been seen.”

Like lots of other Harry Chapin songs, it means a lot more than a cute story about a fun kid and a dour teacher. It means that kids start out in life all excited and full of joy and natural curiosity and natural creativity, and stupid rules and the way they’re enforced start beating all of those great things out of them starting in first grade.

I read my sister’s story and thought, “That kid is going to get all that precious, wide-eyed excitement and innate joy beaten out of him, starting today.”

I actually cried.

This is another reason I can’t have kids, by the way. I’d be that mom who’s always falling apart at some perceived injustice or another.

Hell, I cried just typing the story out.

I totally get, by the way, why the kid can’t sing in class. I remember first grade, and I don’t recall being scarred by the realization that I wasn’t allowed to sing in class. (I don’t recall getting in trouble for singing, anyway. I recall getting in trouble for talking and being out of my seat without permission. And I recall standing in corners. In fact, I recall a particular moment in second grade when, standing in the corner, I glanced up at the crucifix nailed to the wall above my head, and my teacher saw me and said, “Yeah, you’d better pray!”) I am not psychologically damaged or less creative for these rules. I think Callie is probably right about structured teachers instilling organizational skills and an understanding that there are times and places for behaviors. It’s not the teachers’ fault. You can’t have a kid busting out with a Katy Perry song in the middle of an addition lesson.

Still… I think I might buy Neph 1 a few supplies he can keep at home. Like a purple composition notebook, and an orange folder. Because there are so many colors in a flower. And I want him to see every one.

And I’m glad my brother-in-law accidentally picked up peach-scented hand sanitizer. 

Now on my bookshelf: The Goldfinch – Donna Tartt