crooked house

Demfinitely Houses Are Maded

 

Photo from this site.

Yesterday in the car Luke and I were talking about the difference between things that are natural and things that are made by people. As we drove along he called out the names of things he could see: "The road!"

"People build roads," I said.

"The trees!" he said.

"They're just there. They're part of nature. They grow out of the ground," I said.

"Wires! Pylons! Grass!" he called out. And I explained that wires and pylons were made by people and that grass was part of nature.

There was a silence. Then:

"Demfinitely houses are maded," he said. And then he started laughing. "Imagine little houses growing out of the ground!"

I explained that actually, people buy house seeds at the hardware store and plant them on suitable plots of land. When we got home, I showed him these pictures as proof. (Okay, no, I didn't.)

Two Memoirs of Childhood, Recommended by Diana Athill

Lately I've been devouring Diana Athill's books. (Too bad there aren't more of them.) Not sure why, but lately I've been on a memoir kick -- I crave them periodically -- and this time it probably started with Doris Lessing's excellent Under My Skin. I'm ashamed to say I'd never heard of this influential editor until a couple of weeks ago when I happened upon her newest, Somewhere Towards the End, a memoir about ageing that Athill wrote in her late 80s.That's one of the most inspiring things about her -- she didn't start writing until she was 43 and she's gone on writing well into old age. (Abigail Thomas, whose work I am also devouring, is another writer who didn't start writing until her mid-40s. Refreshing, aren't they, these memoirists who wait until they've actually lived a little?)

Right now I'm in the middle of Athill's Stet: An Editor's Life, published in 2000, about her time at Andre Deutsch. I've just finished a chapter in which she describes the two books she worked on that have "floated to the surface as being of great value" to her:

   Neither of them was part of a literary career; neither of them sold well; neither of them will be remembered by many readers. What is remarkable about both of them is the person who speaks.
   Over and over again one sees lives which appear to have been shaped almost entirely by circumstances: by a cruel childhood, perhaps, or ... by a corrupt society. These two stories are told by a man and a woman who, if shaping by circumstances were an immutable law, would have been hopeless wrecks. They did not just survive what would have finished off a great many people: they survived it triumphantly.
   The first of these books is Parents Unknown: A Ukrainian Childhood by Morris Stock. He was found as a newborn baby on the steps of a synagogue in a small Ukrainian town; was shunted around the Jewish community to various foster parents, ending with a brutal couple who almost killed him. If an interfering peasant woman hadn't made a fuss when she noticed a little boy almost dead with cold, waiting on a wagon outside an inn, they would quite have done so. The community stepped in again, and he was passed on to a grain-merchant who was eventually to work him very hard, but treated him well. Almost at once he began to be liked and trusted, learning to read and writer and mastering his trade: it seems that as soon as he was free to be himself he revealed intelligence, resilience and generosity. Before he was twenty he had set up business on his own, married a girl he was to love for the rest of her life, and decided to move to London, where he spent the next fifty years prospering, and raising a family remarkable for talent and ability. He was an old man when his daughter persuaded him to write his story, which he did with vigour and precision -- a very charming old man. Some quality at the centre of Morris Stock had been able to triumph over formidable odds.
   And the same was true of Daphne Anderson, who wrote The Toe-Rags. By the time I met her Daphne was the beautiful wife of a retired general, living in Norfolk, better-read and more amusing in a gentle way than I expected a general's wife to be. It was astounding to learn that this woman had once been a barefoot, scabby-legged little girl whose only dress was made from a sugar-sack, knowing nothing beyond the Rhodesian bush and speaking an African language -- Shona -- better than she spoke English. Her parents were the poorest of poor whites, victims of her father's uselessness: he was stupid, bad-tempered, utterly self-centred, incompetent and irresponsible. He dumped her wretched mother, with three children, in the bush and left them there for months on end, sending no money. She scraped by, allowing occasional favours to such men as were about, and the children were looked after by Jim, their Shona servant (no white could be so poor as not to have a servant: it was like Charles Dickens's family taking their little maid into debtor's prison with them). Jim saved not only Daphne's life, but also her spirit, being a rock of kindness and good sense for the children to cling to.
   Not surprisingly, when a decent man asked the mother to go off with him she did, taking her new baby but leaving the three other children in the belief that their father would be arriving next day. She thought that if no one else was there he would have to cope. He did not turn up.

Sara O'Leary and Lindsay Hunter's Hobart Stories Named storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Stories

Before I got pregnant, I briefly acted as an editor for the online edition of Hobart. Two stories I picked for the site have been named Notable Stories by the people who choose the storySouth Million Writers Award. They are Sara O'Leary's Signs and Wonders  and Lindsay Hunter's Unpreparing. Congratulations, you two!

The New Baby's Fighting Technique

A couple of days ago I was videotaping David and Luke as they put their hands on my belly in order to feel the baby kicking. Luke kept putting his hand on my stomach for a moment and then throwing himself halfway across the room before coming back again. I didn't realize until I watched the video that he was imagining the baby kicking him really hard. This may explain his reaction to what happened last night.

Last night when I was lying down upstairs the baby was moving around so wildly that the surface of my belly was rippling and bulging dramatically. It went on for so long and was so clearly visible for the first time that I called for David and Luke to come take a look. They came rushing in and sat down beside me. Of course, the baby immediately stopped moving. "Just you wait," I said. "Wait and see -- she's kicking like crazy. You can actually see it." I looked first at David and then at Luke, who was sitting there with a serious, frightened look on his face as if he expected to see the baby's foot burst through my navel. I laughed at his expression -- and my stomach started to move around because I was laughing. Luke reared back his head in horror. I laughed even harder. And soon the three of us were laughing uncontrollably. I think Luke fully expects that when she finally comes out, the new baby is going to be a veritable master of martial art. Somehow I must make it clear to him that while she is sure to torture us all, she is going to use purely psychological methods. At least in the beginning.

More Disturbing Quotation Marks

You know how things sometimes come in waves? Like, for instance, you read a book about Singapore and then the day you finish it you meet someone from Singapore and then you get a telephone call, a wrong number, from Singapore, and then you buy a book and notice that it was printed in Singapore and then you go to a party and they're serving Singapore Slings? Is there a proper name for this phenomenon, like there is for the phenomena of synchronicity and serendipity?

It's been happening to me lately with unnecessary quotation marks. (I suppose it's not as surprising as all that because, frankly, unnecessary quotation marks are pretty ubiquitous. But I still have the eerie feeling that the universe is trying to tell me something. Haha. Get it? The universe is trying to "tell" me something?) 

The other day at our local hospital I noticed the "Cardiac Investigation Unit." And then a few days later I discovered The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. Today, while looking at the Amazon listing for The Secret Knowledge of Grown-Ups -- how come I don't already own this book? isn't someone supposed to give it to you on your 21rst birthday? -- I came upon another intriguing instance: an Amazon reviewer who is a "Psychiatrist."

Would you feel more or less comfortable discussing your psychological problems with a "psychiatrist"  -- or with a  psychiatrist? Imagine asking the "psychiatrist" for her qualifications. "Well, I 'went' to 'Johns Hopkins'" she might say, making air quotes around her face as she talks. Then again, a diagnosis of say, "Obsessive Compulsive Disorder" or "Dissociative Indentity Disorder,"  sounds much less serious than the same mental illness without the quotation marks.

More Words

I'm not sure how much longer these pronunciations will be with us so I am going to record them here, as they occur to me. I'm trying to get them on video, too.

1. "lellow" for "yellow"
2. "dispaheared" for "disappeared"
3. "animers" for "animals"
4. "hopsital" for "hospital"
5. "inspensive" for "expensive"

Rug Burn and Canadaspeak

When I picked up Luke from preschool at lunchtime, he had a few new marks on his face and some evidence of a bloody nose. Apparently he fell face first off the jungle gym and into the carpet. Vocabulary words of the day? "Rug burn."

***

Luke is examining the tag on one of his birthday presents, a soft plastic worm covered with spines that glows when you squeeze it, which appears to have been made in Germany.

Luke: What language is this? German? Isn't there any Canadaspeak?

So many questions: How did he know that the tag was written in a foreign language? How did he know it happened to be German? And how come he doesn't know that the language he speaks is called English?

Four. It is a fascinating and mysterious age.

Babies in Literature Series: Rick Bass's The Wild Marsh

I first read this excerpt from Rick Bass's forthcoming book The Wild Marsh in last month's issue of O magazine and I was thrilled to discover it just now on her site. (It's all Oprah all the time around here, isn't it?) In the following passages, Bass writes about how his daughter Mary Katherine stopped breathing twice the night she was born. After the first time, Bass stayed awake all night to watch her and caught the second time. This really resonated with me -- I did the same thing, only I tried to do it for about six months instead of one night.

I think that when you save someone, you become saved. I think something passes between you and the rescued person, something almost entirely unnoticed, as if some thin and perhaps artificial barrier—a gauzy curtain that gives each of us a bit of necessary distance from all others—has been pulled away: as if such distance, believed to exist at the heart of all things, might really exist only in our imaginations.

Mary Katherine stopped breathing the night she was born. Elizabeth had delivered her, and we were in our hospital room; Mary Katherine was still in her first 24 hours of life. Her vital signs had been perfect at birth, and remained fine. But only a few hours after we moved to our room, she just stopped breathing. Her face scrunched up and turned red as she gasped and sucked and waved her fists, and then she wasn't getting any air at all.

I grabbed her and went running down the hall. It felt like football days, the narrow unoccupied hallway a path to travel as quickly as possible with a dire force in close pursuit, and time the most vanishing, valuable thing.

In the meantime, Elizabeth had called down to the front desk, and an elderly nurse, a tiny old woman, came hurrying around the corner.

Before I had time to explain, the nurse flipped Mary Katherine over so that she was holding her facedown, cradling her belly in the palm of one hand, and tapped her on the back, then lifted her upright. And just like that, she was breathing the clean, sweet air of life again.

Back in our room, Elizabeth had gotten disentangled from her bedsheets and was running down the hall in her robe, barefooted, trailing tubes and towels and blood, and by the time she reached us, she was faint, terrified, and it was hard to believe that, this quickly, everything was all right again.

I was already amazed at the astonishing miracle of life, and to receive now, scant hours later, a second miracle—salvation—was indescribable. I remember feeling joyous and terrified both, and wondering how other parents did it, if every hour was to be filled with this intensity of emotion.

They put Mary Katherine in an incubator for the rest of the night, with some kind of sensor taped to her, so that if she stopped breathing again—for longer than 10 seconds, I think—a buzzer would go off. The nurse said it wasn't uncommon for newborns to stop breathing, but that usually they started right back up again. She said Mary Katherine must have gotten some kind of obstruction, milk or phlegm, and briefly choked.

I hated that she couldn't be with us, her first night in the world, but the nurse assured us she'd be asleep anyway, and would never know we weren't there.

Still, I stood on the other side of the glass and watched her for most of the night. If she opened her eyes, I wanted her to see that someone was there; if the monitor failed, I wanted to be there to back it up.

I watched her sleep, and breathe; I counted the seconds between inhalations and exhalations. Once, later in the night, she stopped a second time—I was counting, with increasing concern, eight, nine, 10, as Mary Katherine stirred, increasingly uncomfortable—and by 11 I was rushing back to the nurses, though by the time we returned, she was breathing easily again.

The nurse unstrapped the monitor, examined it, recalibrated it, and tested it against the side of the bed; when it had been motionless for 10 seconds, it began to beep.

I can't remember what the nurse said, or how she explained it, though she did allow that sometimes the monitors weren't always perfect.

Bleary-eyed, I watched for the rest of the night. Mary Katherine kept breathing, and the monitor never beeped. The nurses were just across the hallway, but what was one night of lost sleep to me, in the grand scheme of things, and her very first night, at that?

What I think I felt, that next day, was a newness of responsibility: an utter and concrete reminder that I was no longer the most important person in the world—that, in fact, I was nothing, and she was everything.

How such knowledge saves a person, I can't quite be sure, but I felt rescued, felt as if I had passed completely through that thin curtain and into some finer land where the self dissolved, and another was born. I still feel that way, anytime I look at either of my daughters, Mary Katherine or her younger sister, Lowry, and I know that other parents feel that same way—I have heard them speak of it, had in fact heard such things even before I became a parent myself, though in those earlier days, such discussions had held no meaning for me, possessing the quality of sound of a radio playing faintly in another room, with the language of the radio's music identifiable, but with the individual words, and their message, indistinguishable.

There is nothing like it, that feeling of love and responsibility you have for a child, especially a child in danger, and it's true, it's as if the self completely dissolves when you experience it. It's not a feeling that lasts forever, obviously -- but it's certainly an experience akin to a moment of spiritual transcendence. And it's not necessarily a comfortable experience at all. It can feel huge and terrifying and powerful and true. I think of this when I think of childless friends -- what would I tell them if they asked me whether they should have children? The experience is more difficult than anything else in the world, the work is so easy to screw up, and all of it is so rewarding in ways that don't necessarily feel rewarding in any way you're familiar with. And yet I feel like, at least for me, not having children would be much worse than never having fallen in love.

How to Talk To Your Kids About Sex On Oprah

Instead of painting my pregnant belly as an Easter egg, I should probably paint it as a giant potato. For once again I have become a big old couch potato. I was definitely one in the beginning. For the first three to four months of this pregnancy I felt like I was dying, so much so that when I had my first ultrasound I badgered the technician to make sure there was a fetus in there and not a lump of cancerous tissue. (At my age and with my history of fertility problems, I would've been less surprised by a diagnosis of cancer than pregnancy, anyway.) Then, once I got past that first trimester and started taking iron supplements, I was able to get off the sofa, at least now and then. However, as I enter the third trimester, I am once again so anemic that I suffer heart palpitations and breathlessness whenever I walk around the house. The other day I had to leave the shopping mall in the middle of a bunch of errands because I felt like a) I was about to pass out and b) the baby was about to explode out of the region of my belly button right there in the grocery store's check-out line. All this to say that I am once again pretty much a full-time couch potato and that therefore, I watched two complete episodes of Oprah this week. Maybe I should start a blog devoted to nothing but reviewing the Oprah show.

Yesterday's show featured Dr. Laura Berman, the sexpert with the Oprah seal of approval. And after watching it, I have decided to give her the Crooked House seal of approval, too. Unlike the show a few days ago about mothering, this show provided useful -- and inevitably controversial -- advice, in this case about how to talk to your kids about sex, which is, for many, many people one of the most difficult aspects of parenting. It's also probably the main area where parents screw up the most, generally by not providing enough information and by not appearing open, non-judgemental, and non-threatening enough for their children to come to them to talk about sex. What was particularly interesting about this episode was that Dr. Berman focused on being positive about sexual pleasure with your children. This translated to including the concept of masturbation (and stressing that it's perfectly fine and normal) when you first have the discussion about the mechanics of sex to a child, most likely when that child is around 10 years old. This absolutely floored many of the people in the audience and particularly Oprah's friend Gayle King, who looked like she needed smelling salts. And then, then Dr. Berman went on to say that when your daughter is in her mid-teens and your conversations are getting more specific, you might want to tell her about vibrators that are designed for clitoral stimulation. This, of course, had the audience in an uproar. But Dr. Berman was still able to make her point that, if you teach your children about sexual pleasure and let them know how they can give it to themselves, they're not going to be as quick to run out and look for it from somebody else.

If only I'd had a vibrator seven months ago, I wouldn't be stuck on this couch right now.

I'm kidding. (I mean it, Mom, I'm really kidding! I never heard about vibrators until yesterday! Honest!) But I'm not kidding about how informative this particular Oprah show was on a difficult parenting issue.

On Learning to Read, With an Excerpt from Ali Smith's Introduction to The Book Lover

Ali Smith on her earliest reading experiences, from the introduction to The Book Lover, an anthology of some of her favourite pieces by other writers:

   I learned to read early: I was three years old. According to my father, I learned by pairing the heard names of programmes to the words in the TV listings in the paper, and I can actually remember working out the link between the spoken and written words "fine" and "woman" on the Beatles double-A sided 45, "She's a Woman / I Feel Fine". By the age of eight I'd read everything in the house; it felt fine, to read.
   I was precocious, because born at the end of a family of five children, with my closest brother seven years older than me. This meant the cupboard above the bed in the bedroom, which I shared with my two much older sisters, was full of the books they and my brothers were reading, mainly secondary school set texts, I suppose now, though there were rogue copies of unexpected things, and there was certainly a lot of Georgette Heyer up there (belonging to my sister Anne, who had the ability to remove herself so deeply into a book that you could be shouting her name right next to her ear and she'd not hear you).
   I wasn't much for historical romance (though I quite liked the horses in it). I ignored the piles of Heyer and read all the other books in the cupboard. It wasn't till I was in my twenties and reading for a university degree that I realized I'd read my way through a lot of Joyce, Orwell and Swift before the age of ten.

I always have trouble believing people when they announce they've read a lot of someone like Joyce before the age of ten. But that's probably because I personally was a solid six or seven before I really learned to read, and I needed a little extra attention from the first grade teacher in order to catch up to the top students in the class. Back then they used to divide classes into two or three groups. They were often assigned random names, those groups, perhaps after flowers or animals, but it was a matter of minutes before every child in the class could figure out that the "Sunflowers" --for example -- were the "Smart Ones", the "Daisies" were "Middling" and the "Dandelions" were the "Dummies." I'd attended a different school for kindergarten, where the focus had clearly been more on play than academics, and after the first couple of days of grade one the teacher bunched me in with the equivalent of the Daisies. I promptly went home and complained to my mother, who asked the teacher to help me catch up to the Sunflowers. The school was in rural Nova Scotia, the teacher was nearing retirement, and we actually used those old Dick and Jane readers. I remember the first real book I ever truly read by myself was an ancient musty copy of one of the Bobbsey Twins Series. How about you?