Three mothers, six boys

Last week I began and rapidly finished a knit commission. My assignment: two tiny hats for two premature baby boys. Twins, two pounds each. Such tiny hats don’t take long, maybe a couple of hours total. An episode of Downton Abbey and a couple of podcasts will do it.  Longer projects, like the Aran sweater I made for Malcolm and which has now been handed down to his brother, require little bits of several months. The knitting takes place on car rides, while watching movies, in waiting rooms and under the table in large, boring meetings. Sometimes, a piece of knitting becomes indelibly associated with a place or an event. Once it does, the association is pressed, stitch by stitch, into the memory of the piece. I finished the Aran sweater while we were on vacation on Thompson Lake in Maine. Every time I pull that sweater out of the drawer, I am transported back to that rock-strewn glacial beach.

These tiny hats had such a clear fate. I could see them on the fist-sized heads of these two boys whose future, as far as anyone can read it, lies in a plastic walled isolette in a NICU. I thought about them as I knitted round after round. The thought gets threaded into the yarn invisibly, though to me it’s as clear as a scrap of red ribbon woven into a brown bird’s nest: a bright streamer amid the dry grass.

When the hats were done, I laid them side by side to admire them for a while before I sent them off. The image of these two tiny hats, side by side, was nagging at me all the day after. As I went to package them up, I realized why. The two rounded shapes, side by side, brought to my mind a double tombstone in a churchyard a few towns over, sacred to the memory of two sons of Edward and Mary Bass. The two boys died 5 years apart, and neither was much to either side of one year old. I think of Mary Bass, and the mother of the two tiny twins, and all my troubles evaporate. I have more than I justly deserve. My two sons are above ground, and well.

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The return of Sundays-read-the-paper

Christophe circa 2000. Not so different from today. We even still have those birds.

For a few weeks now we’ve been getting the Sunday New York Times. When we were in college, our Sunday mornings unfolded leisurely. Then came the period of law school studies, vet school studies and before vet school was even officially over, the first kid. Then, the second kid the standard two years later. What all of this meant was that our Sunday mornings with coffee and the paper went extinct for a period of years. But now, it appears, they are back. Not in entirely the same fashion of course. Our kids, no longer omni-needy, can be sent off to play for an hour or two. Sometimes this requires us to turn a blind eye to some alarming circumstances, but this is a price worth paying. Yesterday, for instance, the boys were playing while we sat downstairs with some grown up friends. There were several dull thuds and then an excruciating and prolonged scraping sound, then a final thud. Christophe looked at me quizzically, and I said one of many things I didn’t realize I would say before I had kids, “They’re out in the crawl space. That’s why the sound is amplified.” The unheated, unlit, wood plank floored crawl space. We’ve had mice there, and flying squirrels I suspect. Perhaps, I thought to myself, the boys’ presence in there will keep the rodents at bay. And I took another sip of my coffee.

Sundays are still best spent with the paper and coffee. I have noted a significant uptick in robots in recent years, however.

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Christophe to run Boston marathon; becomes one of Malcolm’s “most fascinating people.”

Christophe, my retiring and introverted husband, will be running the Boston marathon this year. The training for it suits him since it requires a lot of solitary training runs. The race itself… the jostling throngs, the jocular camaraderie, these will suit this borderline misanthrope somewhat less well. Why would he sign up for such a thing? For a very good cause indeed. In order to run in the race, he must raise at least $5,000 for Casa Myrna, a Boston based organization that provides services to domestic violence victims and survivors. They provide everything from a 24-7 hotline to shelter to legal help to workforce training.

Running a marathon is no small feat, but Christophe is far more daunted by the fundraising goal than by the physical demands, which are many. There are the countless 7 mile treadmill runs in our basement beside our clanking boiler. The long runs on weekends in 7 degree temperatures, the blisters, the exhaustion, and the chafing. So much chafing. There have many opportunities to run races for charity and he has passed them all up. But this chance to raise the money for Casa Myrna has captured his heart. It’s a cause he genuinely believes in, and there’s  no room for half measures. As I type this, I can hear him pounding away on the treadmill after giving the kids a bath and cleaning up after supper.

This inspiring story has also caught the attention of renowned interviewer and five year old Malcolm Courchesne, who sat his father down for some tough questions about the marathon. After watching this hard-hitting and poignant interview, you will undoubtedly be asking yourself, “What can I do to help?” The answer is simple. You can give money. Donate via Christophe’s secure fundraising page. Donate any amount you can. For those of you whom I know personally, t’s the only way to avoid a deluge of repeated requests for money over the next couple months. And for those of you whom I don’t know, please help so I don’t have to turn this blog into a groveling act of mortifying desperation with overly detailed reports on his training and the condition of his feet. Please. Please help.

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My membership vest

After a frenzy of knitting for other people, with a queue sometimes 5 items long, I finally had a chance to knit something for myself. So I knitted myself what was billed as a waistcoat, but which is, I hope, vest-like enough to qualify me for residence here in New Hampshire. I grew up within a mile of the NH border, but had never really lived the northern New England lifestyle. Now, my husband is employed in Concord, the capital, and I am gradually growing accustomed to the existence of things like “dressy fleece” and “really nice moccasins” for special occasions like meeting the Governor.
The other day, I was at a Salvation Army thrift store in Portsmouth NH and I watched a women in an extremely bright green and puffy down jacket approach a mirror. She thoughtfully gazed at herself as she held a garment up to her chest. It was an extremely bright orange and puffy down jacket. These people know what they like.
A year or so ago, we went on a weekend trip to Portland, Maine. We had reservations at a pretty nice restaurant, so I brought a cute dress, black tights, and leather boots. We were seated up in a balcony overlooking the main restaurant, and it gradually dawned on me that every other patron in the place was clad in at least one fleece item, and almost universally shod in LL Bean mocs. Wasted was my attempt at dressing right. I was clearly marked as a non-local.
I won’t live that way anymore! But neither will I wear a fleece vest unless I am hiking. No matter how fancy and dressy it is. I’m hoping that knitting my own fleece vest substitute will strike the right note of vestiness and self-reliance that is New Hampshire’s flinty foundation. I’ll let you know if it gets me invited to meet the Governor.

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Welcome squash bugs!

Our house is moderately infested with squash bugs*. They are the stalking, brown, elongate bugs that move into heated buildings with the first frost. I know they aren’t good; they feed on plant juices and I suppose they could harm my houseplants. But they don’t seem to be doing a lot of damage, so I permit them to stay. They are capable of flying, but generally walk, plodding stoically across the floor where I often almost step on them. It’s amazing the amount of foot force they can withstand. They seem to be all in a prolonged process of dying, and they flail on their backs, or droningly fly and then thwap into the sides of things, or people’s faces. They turn up in the sink, the bathtub and on the couch. Their weird, antennaed heads crest my book while I’m reading in bed. In one macabre incident, I reached for the handle of the bathroom faucet, not seeing the bug on its underside. A surprisingly loud and rich crack sounded, and I looked down to see a bug stomping off with only five legs, a tiny, exoskeletoned drumstick under my finger.

I’m not particularly gentle with them, and they are quite satisfying to flick away. I don’t particularly try to avoid them when vacuuming, and they give up a faint smell of carrots when they’re sucked into the bag. But I don’t strive to remove them either. As I watched one make a lunatic flight into my arm and bounce into a laundry basket, I realized why. Short days, snow, the cold. They don’t keep us inside, but outside, it’s so quiet. Nothing drones and seethes like insects, and without them, it’s a quiet world. The crickets that stowed away in the basement woodpile in the fall are long dead, and only the squash bugs are with us now. I’ll take what I can get of the movement and the noise.

*entomology note: “bug” has a very specific scientific meaning, and refers to a particular kind of insect. Squash bugs and stink bugs are both true bugs. Lady bugs are not. They are beetles. I have, at various times, had squash bugs, stink bugs and lady bugs in my house. But, as my friend Michelle rightly pointed out, most of the bugs in houses around here this time of year are Western Conifer Seed Bugs. But that just doesn’t have the right sound to it, for a blog post. So I cheated a bit.

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Superdeluxe hometown heterosexual nostalgia running tour

I live two towns over from the town where I grew up. Yesterday, I decided to do my four mile run in my hometown of Amesbury, Massachusetts, rather than my present town. When I run someplace, I usually spent time plotting my route online to make sure I get to the right number of miles. When I run in my hometown, I never need to. I know that town by heart, and I know it by foot. Adults will usually measure distances by how long it takes to drive it. Things are five minutes away or 45 minutes, but who knows how many miles? Runners do. And kids do, without knowing they know it. Since I traveled every mile of Amesbury by foot or by bike as a kid, I just know how far apart things are. I know every house, and every sidewalk, so I don’t have to think about my route. This leaves time for the mind to wander. Since I’m here in my hometown almost every day, I am inured to the kind of heart piercing nostalgia that strikes when you haven’t seen a place in years. My nostalgia is less intense, and tends to hone in on particular items.

Morning in an ex-mill town. A stop on the nostalgia running tour.

Yesterday, I was thinking about a friend of mine who said she gets a bit irritated when people ask her “when did you know you were gay?” After all, she says, no one ever asks, “when did you know you were straight?” And as I ran by my old elementary school, and by my childhood friends’ houses, Amanda’s, Jessica’s, Aaron’s, I embarked on a memory tour of men, and I realized, I knew I was straight when I was nine. I was nine and in Mr. Cassidy’s class, and I didn’t know what a crush was, but I had one on him. I never had to endure what a lot of gay kids go through–feigning straightness, risking ostracism–but I think I kind of understand it. From 4th grade on, I was feigning interest in New Kids on the Block, and in supposedly crush-worthy middle school classmates while secretly, I pined over a parade of teachers, one for each year. Running by those friends’ houses, I thought of all their fathers. The goofy, corny-joke-telling ones; the distant or mostly absent ones; the soft voiced and kind ones. I tried to recall my friends’ mothers, and they were mostly vague, blurred figures at the fringes of my mind. Christophe jokes that he’s fortunate that our marriage has survived this far, since he’s now about at the minimum age required for a man to catch my attention.

As I rounded a corner downtown, past the Catholic Church where I was an altar server, past the library that was my second home, I was jarred out of my reverie by the flat voice of my phone announcing mile 4. Having planned my route not at all, I had measured out the miles so precisely that I slowed to a walk not ten steps from my car, set to drive part of the same route I’d just run, but no longer in the company of all my ghosts. It seems they too prefer to travel on foot.

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In with the out crowd

In biology, there is an organizational technique called cladistics. Cladistics uses a bunch of characteristics to group organisms in a “cladogram”  based on whether they possess or lack each of those characteristics. To make a cladogram, you look at your list of characteristics and your list of organisms and you say things like, “Does this thing have jaws? If yes, proceed. If not, branch off into an out group spur.” Same for “lungs? yes/no” and “fur? yes/no” and so on until you get a rough family tree like this:

In this example, the hagfish would be considered the ultimate “out group” because it lacks ANY of the characteristics used to generate the tree. The hagfish is an eel shaped creature that can tie its sinous body in a knot and will eviscerate its dead (or not quite dead) food source by squirming inside it and slurping its way out.
The innermost “in group” in this cladogram example is the mammals. Humans are mammals, and very tribal. And therefore somewhat xenophobic. Believe me, no one wants to be the slime secreting, jawless, carcass sucking hagfish.

The hagfish.

And yet, when I contemplate the cladogram of social acceptability, I find myself in the hagfish slot sometimes. I call myself a vegan since it’s a quick way to get my point across. I’m not actually a vegan since I wear animal products (leather, wool, silk) and I eat honey (produced by animals). But other than that, I don’t eat any foods made by or from animals. This can be, as you might expect, socially awkward. Sometimes people hear that I’m a vegan and visibly flinch. And since no one wants to be the hagfish, I find myself qualifying and backpedaling, and otherwise trying to hurdle a few rungs over on the cladogram of Americanism, which I think works out like this:

So, if I don’t want to be less American than Communists, I have to say things like, “Oh, no, I’m not one of those vegans who join PETA and shame other people and self-flagellate and are totally ridiculous. I’m ok, really, I’m cool, I think it’s cool that you eat meat, really! In fact, I kill animals all the time, I just don’t eat them.” Because if I don’t want to be in the ultimate outgroup, then it’s imperative to find some even outter out group. This requires making someone else seem weird and ridiculous. My vegetarian friends do it too: “Yeah, I’m a vegetarian, but don’t worry, I eat cheese. I mean, my God, who gives up cheese?” Weirdos. Vegans.

So I’m working on doing that less. Because people can ignore my food choices, or not care about them, or judge them to be patently ridiculous if they want to, but I don’t need to try to win social acceptability by mocking anyone else. That’s pitiful, pathetic, weak behavior (and yes, I hear your jokes about how I wouldn’t be so weak if I just had a steak once in a while. Believe me, whatever your joke about vegans is, I have heard it. Because they are all. the. same.)

So, I’m trying to catch myself before I throw anybody else and her diet under the bus. After all, there’s plenty to mock about my diet. I mean, even the hagfish isn’t vegan.

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Death day for chickens

A little before Christmas, my dad, who keeps chickens (as we do) asked me to kill his birds. He had only three, and they’re about that old, so their productive laying days are at an end. Of course, they could live on into their dotage another ten years or so, eating feed, requiring cleaning, and taking up space that could be occupied by young, producing birds. That will not do. So, die they must.

Layer birds of a certain age like this are no good for eating. They are stringy, tough, and gristly. They could be boiled down for stock, but that’s not worth the effort of plucking and cleaning their leathery old carcasses. Therefore, there was no need to kill them via axe or knife, so I did what I know best and euthanized them veterinary style, with a needle full of viscous pink liquid. The first bird was sickly anyway, so no hard feelings there. But the second bird was amply fleshed (obese) and spry. This is always harder. No farmer takes pleasure in killing animals. It’s not tragic, nor is it emotionally scarring, but it is a grim necessity, and one you know will come even as you’re watching the peppy springtime chicks scratching around in their little box. You know that one day, you will have to kill them. Whether for meat, or to make room.

Backlit on the windowsill, the Virgin Mary of the Coop.

I have never had trouble euthanizing things. It makes me feel useful. When I interviewed for vet school, I said I liked doing euthanasias most about small animal practice. They still let me in. I meant only that it’s generally the merciful thing to do, and it’s a great opportunity for empathy toward animal and owner (if there is one). I have long experience euthanizing wild things, and that is always because they are gravely injured or ill. There are no sobbing owners to contend with either. I have euthanized family pets too, and my feelings toward the animal are similar, though it requires a great deal of mental distraction not to fall in with weeping children and old men, in particular. The chickens are somewhere in the middle. Not wild, but not pets either. We don’t shed a tear over these chickens, but it’s not without some sadness. I had to chase the second bird around a while, and finally caught her, saying “Jeez bird. You act like someone’s trying to kill you,” to lighten the mood a bit. Then it was the needle for her too.

The third bird looked up at me as I reached for her, then she looked down at the coop floor and proceeded to moonwalk its entire length. I burst out in bewildered laughter and my dad told me that’s her signature move. It’s harder to kill a bird with a signature move, but kill her we did.

So now, his coop is empty, awaiting spring and a flock of new girls. My own elderly hens are on a reprieve, mainly because my neighbor is very attached to them and looks at me with horror when I bring up their approaching demise. Strange in some ways that we’re vegans keeping (and occasionally killing) chickens, but the explanation for that is complicated and will have to wait for another post. Until then, take solace, as the chickens certainly did, that Mary, Mother of God, was gazing down, feather dust and manure besmirched, from the sill of a coop window on their last day. And her serene smile is unwavering.

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This is a winter run.

The more I run, the more running seems to parallel childbirth. When I had my second son, I elected not to go the epidural route. “But why?!” I hear so many of you shriek, “Why be a martyr?!” I am not a martyr, I assure you. Had childbirth been an excruciating ordeal of unmitigated misery, I would not have declined the injection just so I could strut around and feel superior. In fact, aside from this blog, which you are free not to read, I don’t typically bring up my experience, and I certainly don’t tell expectant or new moms about it unless they ask. If I had been required to sign a total non-disclosure agreement and never tell anyone about the way I had my second son, I’d have done it. Because it wasn’t about you, it wasn’t about any other mom, it wasn’t even about my son. It was all about me. Running is selfish in just that way.

I know a lot of mommies who feel guilty for taking time away from their kids to work out. The decision is easier for me: when I don’t run, I get anxious and obsessive. When I get that way, I scream right in my kids’ faces and whap them on the backs of the heads for nothing. So I go out and run. Because the guilt that comes after you have screamed at your son until he cries is far beyond the guilt of running for an hour.

Burrows Brookside sanctuary, en route.

Yesterday, a 10 miler was on the docket. It was 25 degrees, windchill of 11, and winds gusting to 36mph. The snow had stopped, but the sidewalk-less and shoulder-less state roads around here were narrowed by slush and ice. I was nervous about getting done in by a plow guy. Or just a texting dummy driver. But I went out, running into a wind so thick I could lean into it like a solid thing, then sideways to a wind that blew me off the road twice. I willed the cars not to hit me, forcing them away from me through the sheer power of my baleful glare.

Sucking in plumes of woodsmoke and splintered cold, my chest constricted and then, gradually, a radiating ache spread all the way out to my back. Face festooned in snot, I turned onto some poorly plowed back roads and climbed the hills, sliding backward in an awkward moonwalk with every step. At mile 5, the maximum distance I could be from home, I was pulled up short by a cramp in my right calf. An interval of limping. Then it subsided to a dull ache, and I proceeded past the only other souls out in such weather: old men in ill-fitting coats and pom-pom hats snowblowing their driveways. They appeared astonished to see me out there. I astonished myself a bit.

There is part of running that’s about vanity. When a student of mine, a competitive 5K runner, asked what I run, I told him distance. He said, “Yeah, you look it.” I elected to take it as a compliment, rather than an assessment of my scrawniness. I never would have predicted that I would ever have the lean, sinewy look of a distance runner. I had always been solidly muscular, a sprinter and a soccer player. There’s an appeal in this new appearance, to be sure. Still, I won’t ever be described as lanky, and certainly not willowy. After all, there are things a 5’1″ chick can be only in her dreams.

In addition to the physical vanity, there’s the mental vanity too. I don’t keep my running a secret, because it helps me and motivates me to keep people posted on what I’m running and have run. But 7 miles in, in the sideways wind, and the trucks bearing down, and the snow blind slogging under the wan, feckless sun, it is about no one but me. I couldn’t do it just for bragging rights, and I couldn’t do it for smugness or superiority, or the martyrdom. But I can do it for my sanity. For the purification of my mind. And, but for the pom-pom hat guys, for the utter solitude.

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