Currently Idle

An exchange

“Happy, um… is it, Hannukah?”

“Thanks! And merry, ah… let’s see… Christmas – right?”

Many Kids Outgrow Nut Allergies

NPR ran a story this morning about kids who outgrow their allergy to nuts. Many of them do, evidently. Check it out. I especially like the mom who says “It’s hard when they tell your kid he can eat all the nuts he wants, which they told you yesterday would kill him.”

Don’t you love doctors?

Caulking

I love caulking. I mean, it’s a pain and it takes up half a day that I’d rather spend doing other things. But the actual experience of putting it in the windows is very pleasurable.

It unrolls cleanly. If you’re careful, you can pull off one string of caulk long enough to do the whole side, without breaking it. The caulk is just a tiny bit sticky – enough to stay in the crack between the frame and the window, but not enough to stick to your fingers.

Best of all, as you press it into the gap, you can feel the draft stop. That’s the draft that made you shiver every time you walked by the window without your warm clothes on. Suddenly it’s gone. The house feels secure again. You can undress without pain. You can dream about the money you’ll save on heating oil now that you’ve caulked.

The whole thing with the plastic and the hair-dryer, on the other hand – that, I hate.

Sleet

The baby gets picked up whenever she wants. That’s probably exactly what the problem is. Once they get in that habit, they pretty much expect it to be that way for the rest of their lives.

Anyhow I was sitting at breakfast with the baby on my lap, with her eating more of my bagel than I was; and my four-year-old suddenly got very whiny and forgot how to speak in full sentences. And Rivvy pointed out that she had put her to bed last night, and I had worked through the weekend, and she had not seen very much of her father recently. So I said to Older-Daughter-Of-Xingu, “would you like to have lunch with me this afternoon?”

And she said, “sure.”

The rain was just turning to sleet as I pulled up. She was waiting in her rain boots, jeans, and a pink sweater under a raincoat. “Puddle day,” she declared, but nonetheless decided to be pushed to Carol’s in the fluorescent green all-weather stroller that looks like a moon lander, which Rivvy found on Craig’s List.

It was nice and warm inside. We had no trouble finding a seat. There were only three other people in the restaurant. We peeled off all our wet outerclothes and sat in a booth (booths are special) and watched the sleet turn into snow outside, and listened to trucks swooshing by, and corny old songs on the radio.

Carol had given her kids the day off. She was cooking and her mom took our orders.

Xingu had a tuna melt and Older-Daughter-Of-Xingu had pancakes with syrup on a Teletubbies plate. We read some of the remaindered children’s books Carol keeps on a bookshelf in the corner. Older-Daughter-Of-Xingu had seconds on her pancakes. Xingu, who is trying to give up coffee, drank some coffee.

By that time the stroller, which had been left outside uncovered, had filled up with slush and ice water. So we pushed it home, stomping through all the puddles in our rain boots.

And that’s all.

Grammarian

On Currently Idle, as we all know, spelling is everything. To this end, look what I found.

Rabbit?

The Star Splitter

The Star Splitter
Robert Frost

You know Orien always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orion’s having caught me.
Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights
These forces are obliged to pay respect to?”
So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk
Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,
Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And spent the proceeds on a telescope
To satisfy a life-long curiosity
About our place among the infinities.

“What do you want with one of those blame things?”
I asked him well beforehand. “Don’t you get one!”
“Don’t call it blamed; there isn’t anything
More blameless in the sense of being less
A weapon in our human fight,” he said.
“I’ll have one if I sell my farm to buy it.”
There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground
And plowed between the rocks he couldn’t move,
Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years
Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And bought the telescope with what it came to.
He had been heard to say by several:
“The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see;
The strongest thing that’s given us to see with’s
A telescope. Someone in every town
Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.
In Littleton it may as well be me.”
After such loose talk it was no surprise
When he did what he did and burned his house down.
Mean laughter went about the town that day
To let him know we weren’t the least imposed on,
And he could wait–we’d see to him to-morrow.
But the first thing next morning we reflected
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,
We don’t cut off from coming to church suppers,
But what we miss we go to him and ask for.
He promptly gives it back, that is if still
Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.
It wouldn’t do to be too hard on Brad
About his telescope. Beyond the age
Of being given one’s gift for Christmas,
He had to take the best way he knew how
To find himself in one. Well, all we said was
He took a strange thing to be roguish over.
Some sympathy was wasted on the house,
A good old-timer dating back along;
But a house isn’t sentient; the house
Didn’t feel anything. And if it did,
Why not regard it as a sacrifice,
And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,
Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?

Out of a house and so out of a farm
At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn
To earn a living on the Concord railroad,
As under-ticket-agent at a station
Where his job, when he wasn’t selling tickets,
Was setting out up track and down, not plants
As on a farm, but planets, evening stars
That varied in their hue from red to green.

He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for star-gazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as it spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.
That telescope was christened the Star-splitter,
Because it didn’t do a thing but split
A star in two or three the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It’s a star-splitter if there ever was one
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
‘Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.

We’ve looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night to-night
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?

November

Ah, nothing says “November” to me like dragging my kids’ plastic sandbox across the dried, frozen grass to the shed. And now here we are, in our warm house, making lentil-and-sweet-potato soup for our friends… and waiting for the pizza to arrive.