Flockin' Robins

Yesterday, out the back window was a flock of birds. Seagulls? No. Ducks? No. Geese? No. A flock of robins, all boys. I was not aware that robins traveled in flocks, probably because I always see them alone, and every picture of a robin I've ever seen depicts a solo robin pulling an unlucky worm out of the grass. Our back yard does not have any grass, or an abundance of worms that I’ve seen, so why was this flock of robins gathering there, and more importantly, who were they ganging up on? I don’t know what was going on, but I do know that it was not the first strange bird behavior I have witnessed behind the house.

The creepiest bird behavior I have seen was a crow funeral. I know this description may sound strange to anyone who hasn’t experienced it, but a dead crow in your yard brings on what my brothers and sisters and I referred to as a crow funeral. On at least 3 occasions in my childhood, we were alerted to the presence of a dead crow outside by hundreds (well, it seemed like hundreds) of crows, sitting in the branches of the huge tree in our front yard and cawing their little brains out. If we had to venture outside during the funeral, the cawing would grow louder and we would run to the car or wherever we were headed in hopes that the crows would not gang up on us and attack. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the funeral would end, the crows would fly away, and after work my dad would go out with a shovel and get rid of the dead crow.

After college, I lived in a succession of city apartments, so I did not have a lot of time to observe bird behavior. However, once I was married and spending a lot of time at home with the kids, I discovered that birds are more crazy than their sweet tweeting and graceful forms would suggest. One time a bird built a nest on top of the light over our back deck. When her little birdies hatched, they would hop down and sit right on our windowsill where the kids could get a good look at them. My husband did not find them to be very cute, however, mainly because the mommy bird somehow got the idea that my husband was coming for the babies, and would dive bomb his head every time he came outside to use the grill. I don’t know if she ever made contact, but she did manage to scare him off. He eventually went out (waving a broom over his head in self defense) and rolled the grill around the side of the house so that he could cook in peace until the little birdies were big enough to fly away. Following that incident, my husband made regular rounds of the house, making sure that no nests were being planned or constructed on top of any other light fixtures. Once, while we were away on a vacation, some birds built a nest inside our mailbox. Needless to say, when we arrived home they were forced to relocate prior to laying any eggs.

Another unpleasant birdie episode occurred when some baby blue jays either fell out of a nest or jumped out of a nest and landed on our back patio, right next to the pool that I had filled up for the kids. We had gone inside to have lunch and let the pool warm up in the sun, and when I saw the baby birds out there, I should have closed the blinds. Instead, like an idiot, I said “Hey kids, look at the baby birds” and they rushed to the window just in time to see one of the birds hop into the pool and begin drowning. We watched the little thing flail for a few minutes, and as it grew less frantic, I began to fear that it would die in the pool. So, following my husband’s example (and remembering his warning that blue jays are really mean), I grabbed a broom and went outside and managed to flick the little blue jay back onto the deck and run back inside without the daddy blue jay pecking my eyes out. Unfortunately, the commotion spooked the other baby bird and made him jump into the pool. What could I do? I went out with the broom again, flicked the other baby out of the pool, and ran back inside, only to look out and see them both motionless on the ground. At this point, I closed the blinds and redirected the kids to the TV, where the content wasn’t quite so graphic.

My husband and I have differing views on birds. I don’t really think much about them unless I see one that is unusual, like a cardinal or a turkey buzzard, and then I’ll point it out to the kids. My husband applies a definite pecking order (heehee) to the whole species. Cardinals and eagles he likes, robins and blue jays he tolerates, but mourning doves he despises. Strangely, while my husband is at times unable to focus on what I am saying even when I am standing right next to him, he can zero in on the sound of any mourning dove within a five mile radius. The sound drives him absolutely batty, which is quite amusing for me. For a while, a pair of mourning doves was hanging out in our driveway, just sitting there, watching us and waking my husband every morning with their distinctive cooing. When he ran at them and yelled to try to scare them off, they would calmly flutter about 2 yards away, and then return to wandering around on the ground. Fortunately we moved away from that house, because I think continued proximity to that pair might have made my husband lose his marbles.

We are in absolute agreement on the subject of seagulls. They are aggressive, disgusting, noisy and, as was put so well in Finding Nemo, should be considered rats with wings. Nothing brings out my dormant Irish temper like the sight of some moron feeding seagulls on the beach. While a first time beachgoer may think one seagull is cute, he doesn’t realize that that bird’s got 200 friends sitting up above the boardwalk, and they are all coming to get the one cheese doodle distractedly tossed aside. And then they won’t leave, and then they poop everywhere, and then your day is ruined unless the birds spot and even bigger moron tossing more food somewhere else. A close second to seagulls for most disgusting bird is the pigeon. With apologies to Bert from Sesame Street, I have never seen the charm of the city seagull. One summer when I worked downtown, the pigeons were so bold at lunch time, that I expected one to tug on my leg and ask for food.

The worst part about birds though, is they are no longer just pretty, or tuneful, or even annoying, they are becoming more and more dangerous. Years ago, you only had to fear that a crazy bird would take a peck at you. A dead bird used to be something gross that kids would discover and poke with a stick until their mom caught them and made them get away from it. Now a dead bird could mean the West Nile Virus has arrived in your neighborhood. Soon, a dead bird could mean that bird flu has arrived in your neighborhood. Bird poop used to be funny, especially when I was in grade school and a bird would inevitably hit some unlucky kid at the May Procession. Every one would find out about it, and that poor kid would be the butt of jokes for the rest of the year. When you got hit by a seagull at the beach, it was nasty and a source of entertainment for your fellow beachgoers, but after a quick dip in the ocean, you could forget all about it. In Kentucky we must have really irritated a nearby group of birds, because every few days in the Spring, they would strafe our car with an amount of bird crap that would make people on the street stop and stare. Now, when you are unlucky enough to get hit, you must worry whether or not you or your belongings have been hit with nature’s equivalent of a biological weapon.

It must be hard these days to be a bird, everyone eyeing you up like you are some sort of terrorist, poultry farmers rounding up whole families and exterminating them in a sort of avian ethnic cleansing. Birdies must deal with the guilt, the stress, and the waiting to see if they are the ones that are going to bring down the human race by infecting it with bird flu. On second thought, maybe the robins in the back yard weren’t ganging up on anyone, Maybe they were just providing each other with a little birdy support.

Trouble on the High Seas

“127 Feared Dead in Cameroon Ferry Sinking” (3/23/06)

Hmm, that is really sad. Wasn’t there just another big ferry accident? Let’s search a minute…

“Two now believed dead after B.C. ferry sinking off north coast” (3/23/06)

Um, that is not the one I was thinking of; you mean there have been two ferry sinkings just today? Let’s search a little further…

“Fifty missing in Bangladesh ferry sinking” (2/26/06)

No, that is awful, but it’s still not the one I remember, one more time…

“Red Sea bridge plan revived following ferry disaster (3/23/06)… The February 3 sinking of the Egyptian ferry Al Salam Boccaccio 98 in the Red Sea has revived interest in a project to build a bridge linking Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The ferry foundered in the middle of the Red Sea as it sailed from the Saudi port of Duba and Safaga in Egypt. Only 388 out of more than 1,400 passengers were rescued.”

Yes, that is the one I was thinking of, the worst one I can remember. Is it just me, or do you think a certain industry needs to have a safety stand down day?

When I met my husband, his parents had just retired to Cape May, New Jersey, and my parents had a beach house in Delaware. The quickest, easiest, and most expensive way to get back and forth between our families was on the Cape May – Lewes Ferry. It used to have a little jingle – “Cape May Lewes Ferry, enjoy the ri-i-ide” – that my husband and I joked should be our wedding song. Never in those early years did it occur to me that the ferry might sink, and fortunately, it didn’t. Over the past 10 years and over the course of probably 100 crossings, the only problems that we have encountered on the open sea of the Delaware Bay are two bouts of sea sickness in members of my extended family. Usually, the water is so flat, we have trouble determining if we are actually moving. Even on the roughest day, the greatest concern we have about the roll of the boat is whether or not we need to keep our hands on our cocktails to prevent them from sliding across the table.

Since we’ve had little kiddies to take care of however, I have become much more safety conscious on the boat. I always make sure we are sitting near life jackets (actually, it is virtually impossible to sit in an area that is not near life jackets) and I silently (or sometimes out loud) determine which kids I’ll save and which will be my husband’s responsibility. He generally gives me a strange look and returns to his Budweiser, but I always feel better having put the plan in place. I vaguely remember a documentary I saw once about ferry sinkings, how some of the big ferries abroad have large doors that must be closed once all of the cars have been loaded. If the doors are open and the sea is rough, the water pours onto the car deck and sinks the boat. The Cape May ferry does not depend on doors but instead has a car deck above water level. It is also much smaller and takes a much shorter ride across a much calmer body of water. But it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.

A few years ago the ferry people (port authority? I don’t know) renovated all the boats and added nice bars with bartenders where you could get a drink rather than taking a can of beer out of the stand cooler in the cafeteria. They also added restaurants to a couple of the bigger boats where people could have a sort of dinner cruise, eating a meal and watching the sunset on a round trip ferry ride. They advertised these restaurants as great place for parties and wedding receptions, but we never had a chance to investigate because shortly after they opened, the health department shut them down, and as far as I know the restaurants have never reopened. The boats still go back and forth but the restaurants are empty. If we’re hungry, we can get prepackaged food in the snack bar, and maybe that is for the best. Here is what else I found while searching today:

Queen Mary 2 reports outbreak of stomach virus en route to Los Angeles (3/6/06)

Sick Ship – Over 200 Royal Caribbean Passengers Catch Stomach Flu (3/6/06)

Illness sends ship passengers to hospital - Seven cruise-ship passengers were admitted to the Royal Hobart Hospital and 20 more received emergency medical treatment after a health scare on a visiting cruise ship. (3/12/06)

Aren’t cruises really expensive? Isn’t one of their main selling points the 24-hour availability of all the food you can eat? Could it be that the cruise industry has found a way to keep people from eating them out of profits? My in-laws have been on two cruises without getting sick, one to Alaska and one to Russia. Maybe the cold weather keeps the germs at bay. Unfortunately, even if you manage to avoid the germs:

12 from Florida cruise ship die in Chile bus crash (3/23/06)

What? and

Cigarette Eyed in Deadly Cruise Ship Fire (3/23/06).

Are you kidding me? Is it just me, or do you think a certain other industry might benefit from a safety stand down day? According to the box office returns, everyone in the world saw Titanic. Having seen the potential for mass annihilation, why would anyone choose to get aboard one of these death traps? Because they love the show “The Love Boat?” We’ve all seen the sad stories of those happy faces from The Love Boat and what was really going on behind the scenes on the set of that groundbreaking show. Everyone looked like they were having so much fun because they were all coked up. And even that intrepid group of sailors managed to get taken hostage as a group by one man with a spear. Clearly even in the eyes of Hollywood this is not an industry that employs a lot of the country’s finest minds.

However, my favorite cruise ship story is this one:

“On November 5, pirates fired rocket-propelled grenades at a 440-foot luxury cruise liner operated by Seabourn Cruise Line. No one was hurt, and the captain was able to get away before the pirates could board the ship.”

Pirates? Haven’t we made any progress since the days of Blackbeard? That story is from November 5, 2005, not November 5, 1705. Who knows what else is happening on these boats. According to the news channels, if you choose to honeymoon on one you should wear a life jacket at all times and perhaps consider tethering yourself to the boat. You should avoid your fellow passengers and all members of the crew since they have managed to get aboard without undergoing any sort of security scrutiny. Keep an eye out for the food, the fires, the day trips, and now, the pirates. I’m starting to think taking a cruise would not be especially relaxing.

What can be done about these problems on the high seas? I have no idea. I don’t understand how thousands and thousands of people can be lost at sea in the 21st century, or how there is no cure to this epidemic of ferry sinkings. I don’t know if other countries have encouraged their citizens to have a hand in their own safety - whether by suggesting that they check that those big doors have closed or providing an emergency means of communication so that anyone on a troubled boat could try to get help or at least report a fire even if the captain didn’t think it was necessary. I hope they have. As for the cruise ships, I think I’ll just stay away. If we need a romantic getaway with a pool, we’ll get a hotel room with a big hot tub. If we need a 24-hour all-you-can eat buffet, we’ll head to my parents house where the room rates are reasonable, the sanitation is enforced, and in case of emergency, the fire department is right down the street.

Wanted: Baby Groomers

Christina Applegate once guest-starred on an episode of Friends as Rachel’s clueless sister who agrees to take care of Rachel’s baby. When she arrives home at the end of the day, having had the baby’s ears pierced, she announces that she has come up with a new career – baby stylist, providing parents with advice on how to hide their babies’ flaws. This was supposed to be a hilarious example of how clueless she was, unaware that nobody thinks that their baby has flaws. For me, it was a brief moment of hope. I hoped that someone watching the show might make the leap from baby stylist to the career that I have been hoping to see launch for the past 6 years – baby groomer. I once suggested that every city should have a fleet of baby groomers who swoop in, provide manicures, pedicures, hair combing and baths, and then return your sparkling clean children to you. My mother, in her most imperious and disapproving voice, told me, “There are baby groomers, they are called mothers.” Okay mom, but since you once sent me to school with a sandwich bag tie in my hair because you couldn’t find a barrette (actually I thought that was kind of cool), maybe you should back off a little.

When we brought our first daughter home from the hospital, she had a full set of talons that would make any falcon mommy proud. I was terrified of those teeny little fingers with their microscopic little nails, and hoped I could wait a few weeks before I had to try to trim them. Unfortunately, within a few days my daughter was beginning to look like we’d dropped her into a thorn bush, and every time she flailed her arms or stretched, she seemed to cause another pink scratch on her cute little face or arms. I was sure that if I took those tiny little nail clippers to her tiny little nails, I would end up with a tiny little fingertip on my lap. The baby books suggested filing her nails (but they really weren’t hard enough to file) or biting her nails (but that really seemed too disgusting) for parents who were afraid to cut them. But then, quite unexpectedly, my husband came to the rescue and gave our daughter her first manicure. And then he put down those tiny little nail clippers and has never picked them up again.

When we brought our second daughter home, I decided I would tackle the first nail trim, since I had been single-handedly torturing our other daughter for 2 years and figured I was pretty good at it by then. I was not. I had forgotten how thin and soft those little baby nails were, and after trimming five fingers I had two bleeders. The books reassure you that these little wounds don’t hurt the baby and as long as you clean them off, won’t lead to gangrene or flesh-eating strep. I don’t think my mother-in-law believed that though, since when I came back from answering the phone to attempt to trim the other hand, she wouldn’t let me near the baby. She didn’t say anything, but she wouldn’t move from her spot on the sofa where she was serving as a sort of barricade between me and my daughter. I let it go and got the other hand later after the in-laws had returned to their hotel, but I did wonder if I hadn’t been careful enough and that my mother-in-law was right to jump in and save the baby.

Finally, when my son came home from the hospital, I just kept his hands covered. For a week or two I would turn down the cuffs on his sleeves to make sure he didn’t hurt himself. I figured he was too small to need to use his hands anyway, and he was also too small to be maimed by his clipper-wielding mother. After a while though, I decided that he probably needed to see his hands occasionally if he was going to meet the milestone where he notices his hands, so I gave him a trim, only drawing blood once. And so it has continued, the nonstop wrestling with little hands and feet in an ongoing attempt to keep the kiddies from hurting themselves or each other with excessively long nails. The girls have pretty much given up the fight, and just stand there and take it when I say it is time for a trim. My son, however, apparently still thinks that if he can wriggle free from me, he can escape these manicures and pedicures. He can do a 360 and start to low crawl away while I am holding his ankle attempting to get at his toes. He uses whatever appendage he has free to push me and the clippers away while desperately trying to pull free and run. These little episodes are not fun for either of us.

And it’s not just the nails. Every morning I have three heads worth of bed head to comb through and three faces worth of milk moustaches to scrub off. Every morning the girls studiously avoid me and my comb until I am left to sneak up behind them while they are eating breakfast. Every morning they tear up when I mistakenly pull through a knot that was not ready to untangle. In solidarity, my son whines too when I comb his hair, although it rarely has any tangles at all, but is more likely to stick up all over his head like the top of a pineapple. Every morning I must chase them down to clean off their faces, but when we get outside, the daylight always reveals the remains of whatever last bit of breakfast they grabbed before we left.

And then there’s bath time. They argue over who gets in first, who gets out first, who gets their hair washed first, who sits in the front, and who gets to play with the big plastic Dora. One needs ear plugs, two need washcloths to hold over their eyes when their hair is rinsed, and all of them need “just one more minute?” before they are willing to get out of the tub and into their pajamas. Once they are finally out, the scavenger hunt begins, where I must first locate a comb, and then locate the children one by one to comb out their rapidly drying and tangling hair.

So where are you baby groomers? Look at all of the strife and stress you could eliminate from my life, all the arguing and conflict you could alleviate. Here’s how it would work: you could come in every morning and help get the kids ready to go out the door - I’d make the lunches and pack the bags and you would look after the faces and hair. Every few days you could come over and supervise bath time up until their hair is combed, and then I would happily feed them and read to them and get them to bed. We could schedule regular manicures and pedicures, and when they were done, the kids could run to me for comfort rather than away from me in fear. Let’s face it, kids are much more cooperative with teachers and other adults than they are with their parents, so baby groomers would have a sort of power and mystique, like a favorite baby sitter. Any takers?

Unfortunately, I know in America, the baby groomer business would take off, and then it would need to be torn down. Unscrupulous baby grooming rackets would spring up and hand over hefty bills to parents who notice that the kids are still rather grimy when they get out of the tub. The parenting magazines would argue that all of that time you spend making your kids cry through hair combing and nail trimming is actually “bonding” time, and you are doing serious psychological damage to them by denying them those special painful moments. Mothers groups dedicated to “Home Grooming” would lobby Congress to pass legislation outlawing the baby grooming trade. Inevitably, Dateline would air an episode where Stone Phillips casts his steely gaze on an unsuspecting baby groomer as she watches secret footage of herself using her wet thumb to clean a baby’s face. “But the wipes were in the car, and it was only a few crumbs…” she’ll try to explain through her tears, but Stone will have none of it, and will wind up his three part series by providing the telephone numbers for hotlines that will talk you through the steps of combing your six year old’s hair.

Given its inevitable stormy end, I imagine that the baby grooming business will never truly take off or even start up. I must face the fact that I need to gut out the years of hair combing, nail trimming, and bathing until the kids finally don’t need me anymore. I’m sure that when the kids are older, I’ll look back and fondly remember when they were small and depended on me for so much, but I can assure you that none of those happy memories will involve combs, brushes, clippers, scissors, or shampoo.

Fear No Freezer

A few years ago when I embarked on the new American pastime of dieting, the weekly diet regimen that my online "trainer" spit out always included a few frozen meals to save time or provide variety. I always spit back a request for another option that I could prepare myself, because frozen meals had never been a part of my life and, I thought, never could be. I had eaten one frozen dinner in my life, as a child at my best friend Kerry’s house, with rather unfortunate results.

I met my best friend Kerry on the first day of kindergarten at Blessed Sacrament School. We were fast friends, cute little opposites, one blonde and one brunette, in our plaid school uniforms. We quickly formed a kiddie mutual admiration society, each of us sure that the other led a life that would bring much more happiness. I had the big family, the noisy house, the stay-at-home mom, and the homemade cookies. Kerry had two older brothers who ignored us, her own room, a working mom, and best of all, HoHos and Pepsi for after school snacks.

Before I met Kerry, I had never had a HoHo, and to the best of my recollection, the entire 18 years I lived at home with my parents, I never had a HoHo served to me. From the first time I peeled off the foil and bit in, I could not understand why the HoHo was not much more famous than its cousin the Twinkie. Similarly, soda (and it was always generic soda, nothing as famous as Pepsi), in my parents’ house, was a beverage served primarily on Sunday evenings in an 8 ounce Dixie cup. We were Kool-Aid kids, and while I can now appreciate why Kerry would find the endless array of colors and artificial tastes that came from our Kool-Aid jug a treat, at the time I could not imagine why she would come to my house for Kool-Aid when there were always Pepsis stashed under her parents’ kitchen table.

But the HoHos and Pepsis were merely my first exposure to the wonderful world of prepared foods at Kerry’s house. All of the things Kerry’s busy mother was willing to try, my mother studiously avoided in favor of more cost-effective, nutritious, and I must admit, tasty food. Every time I visited Kerry, her kitchen revealed a new advance in the prepared food arena. One morning after a sleepover, Kerry pulled a carton of pre-made pancake mix out of the refrigerator and then proceeded to pour perfect circles onto the griddle as she promised me the best pancakes I’d ever had. The results, needless to say, were quite disgusting, but the idea that the pancake mix was there whenever she wanted it made me envious nonetheless. Her mom bought the dainty little Entenmanns’s soft chocolate chip cookies, Pringles, Mama Celeste Pizza for One (abundonza!), Captain Crunch, and basically was willing to try every food advertised on television.

However, nothing found in her parents’ cabinets or refrigerator seemed as fascinating or full of promise as the frozen TV dinner, another modern advance that my mother steadfastly rejected. Every now and then, as I was leaving Kerry’s house to go home for dinner, I would overhear that her parents were going out and that the kids were going to be served fried chicken TV dinners. These TV dinners were the originals, invented before cable TV and microwaves, that came in boxes adorned with life-sized photographs of the food inside. I could almost taste the crunchy fried chicken, the creamy mashed potatoes, the perfectly cooked green beans, and, the grand finale, the heavenly chocolate cake. I could imagine Kerry and her brothers carefully taking their delicious steaming trays of food up to the TV room to watch a riotous sitcom (another commodity in short supply at my parents house, but that’s another story). They would laugh together, enjoying their delicious dinners in front of the TV as I was forced to sit through another round of steak and potatoes and broccoli at the dinner table with my family.

I was absolutely determined that one day when I came to a sleepover, the TV dinner would be mine. Unfortunately, the sleepovers were always on the weekend, when Kerry’s mother didn’t have to work and thus would usually cook. I know most kids would have been happy with the hamburgers and french fries I was served, but I could get hamburgers and french fries at my house. What I wanted was the gourmet treat that I knew was lurking behind their freezer door.

I’m sure I pestered Kerry about it, asking all sorts of questions about the TV dinners, how delicious they must be, what an improvement on home cooking they must represent. Thinking back, I don’t think Kerry ever romanticized the TV dinner, but then again, Kerry didn’t get much homemade food, and was not raised by a mom who was also a caterer, so her critique of the TV dinner probably would not have been especially instructive anyway. But she was my best friend, and so eventually she harrassed her mom sufficiently to schedule a sleepover that included TV dinners. I arrived with my sleepover bag and we played for a while in her room until finally we were called down to dinner. I was overcome with excitement that finally I would be allowed to enter the sophisticated realm of dining portrayed on TV commercials.

The first shock for me was that we were not heading for the TV to eat our TV dinners on TV trays as I had imagined. We all sat at the dining room table with placemats and napkins, and said grace just like we did at my house. Then with Kerry and her parents closely watching me, I dug into the most anticipated meal of my short life. I knew from the moment I picked up the “fried” chicken that something was desperately wrong. For one thing, the “crispy” coating wasn’t crispy at all, and for another, underneath the “crispy” coating was a layer of whitish-yellow gelatinous goo that I could not identify as being either part of the chicken or part of the coating. I gamely took a bite and got it down with a big swallow of milk (no Pepsi that time, darn it), but as a child I was cursed with an overly sensitive gag reflex, and I knew that if I took another bite of the chicken, my digestive system might stage a revolt. My next strategy was to cut the chicken off the bone, scrape of the coating and surround it on the fork with mashed potatoes. Sheltered child that I was, I had never had instant mashed potatoes and the first forkful sent my mind reeling, “What in God’s name was that?” At least I knew that if I ate my green beans, Kerry’s parents couldn’t be too angry, because every parent likes to see kids eat their vegetables. But again, my mom, who looking back now must have been some sort of hippie, had never put before me a green bean that she had not personally plucked from the produce section, snapped, and cooked to perfection. The salty, tasteless, mushy olive green mass that I had put into my mouth, was determined to come out and I could do nothing to stop it. I managed to get my napkin up to catch the mouthful and stifle the gag, but immediately I knew that I was not going to be able to eat my dinner, that I wasn’t even going to attempt the cake (mainly because you can’t have dessert if you don’t eat your dinner) and that I would be wasting the meal I had lobbied for months to get my hands on.

And from that day until recently, I never ventured into the frozen foods aisle for a frozen meal. As the freezer cases filled with new varieties, new companies, new “healthy choices”, I knew that lurking somewhere inside each cardboard box, under each cellophane wrapper, or within each plastic tray was the same goo that scared me off so many years ago. I wanted to save myself and my now dormant gag reflex from a return to that night at Kerry’s dinner table. However, sometime over the past few years, sometime after my third child arrived, sometime after yet another cereal dinner while my husband was out of town, I finally relented and decided to give the old TV dinner one more try. I carefully inspected the hundreds of options in the freezer case and after a ridiculous amount of time, chose the one I felt was least likely to put me off frozen food for another 25 years. That evening, after four minutes of anticipation as the meal rotated in the microwave, I peeled off the plastic, put my “TV dinner” on a plate, carried it to the coffee table, and turned on the TV. It did not resemble anything my mother would have ever served me, but it was, in fact, a pretty good dinner.

Carpe Chlorine

My parents recently relocated and semi-retired to a brand new home on a golf course in a Delaware beach town. They have furnished the second floor of this home as a grandchild paradise, complete with the toy room filled with toys, books, and movies, the cousin sleepover room with two sets of bunk beds, and the TV room with a huge sectional sofa that my daughter says twenty people could sit on at once. However, right now the big draw of a visit to grandma and grandpa’s house is not in the house, but two blocks away at the golf course club house. I am referring, of course, to the indoor swimming pool. I am not a huge fan of swimming in the winter time, partly because I like my swimsuit season clearly defined by the three months considered summer and partly because I think it is a bad idea to spend an hour in 85 degree water and then head back out into the cold. However, I can definitely understand why my kids think that every opportunity to go swimming must be seized, because a long time ago when I was a kid, I felt the exact same way.

The first swimming pool that I remember is the one that was in my grandfather’s back yard in New Jersey. It was a four foot tall aboveground pool with metal on the outside and a rough vinyl lining on the inside. To enter the pool, you first stepped into a Rubbermaid bucket full of water to clean the sand off of your feet (this particular part of south Jersey has rather sandy soil) and then climbed the metal step ladder that had been shoved up against the side of the pool. At the top you turned around, lowered yourself in, and then lunged for the side of the pool, because it was much too deep for the average child to stand. And for years, that was all we did. My brothers and sisters and I would hang on to the edge of the pool and work our way around and around. Occasionally we would venture onto an inflatable raft or into an inflatable floaty, but there were never enough for all of the cousins, so everyone had to do time clinging to the side of the pool. This was not easy on your fingers or on your feet, but every day we badgered our mom or our aunt or any adult who would listen until they would agree to come out and sit by the pool so we could have a “swim.”

Every summer also included a visit to my Uncle Jack in Massachusetts who had a huge in ground swimming pool in his backyard. It had a shallow end marked off by a rope, and a diving board over what seemed to be an excessively deep deep end. You could sit on the edge of the pool for as long as you liked, getting used to the water and ready for a dip (given that the pool was in Massachusetts, this acclimation was more than necessary because the water was always freezing cold). Once you were ready, you could jump in, or jump off the diving board, or slowly walk in on the steps. We loved visiting Uncle Jack and swimming in his pool, but it never really occurred to us that his pool was better than my grandfather’s pool. In our minds, both households were far superior to ours, because we had no pool of any kind.

We lobbied for years and years to get our parents to install a pool for us. Looking back now, a house on a corner lot on a bus route in Washington, DC, is probably not the ideal location for a swimming pool. Also complicating matters was the yard, which was on the side of the house, not the back. It had a distinct slope, so distinct in fact that the walk out basement door in the back of the house was still two steps above the yard. Unbeknownst to us, my parents did actually discuss whether it would be possible to install a pool in the side yard, but given the small size of the lot and the stockade fence that would have been necessary to keep the pool hoppers out, they concluded it couldn’t be done without making our house look like a colonial fort. Instead, they bought a membership in a pool club about 30 minutes from the house.

Almost every weekday of the summer my mom would pack a cooler and drive us out to the pool club where we would spend hours in the water. The club included a baby pool, a lap pool, and an entire pool that ranged from 2 ½ to 3 ½ feet deep, perfect for short little splashers like us. The pool provided a good escape for my mom too, since we usually only bothered her when we were hungry. Sometimes we would bring our school friends as guests, and sometimes we would run into other members that we knew, but a lot of the time, we were the only kids in the pool, and we were happy. My dad was never a big fan of sitting by the pool, but I’m sure he liked our membership too, since we would arrive home every evening exhausted, ready to eat dinner and go to bed without complaining.

The only private pool that I swam in that did not make me jealous was an experimental pool installed by another uncle. He was in the precast concrete business, and from what I can remember, he decided to install swimming pools by pouring a concrete form and then dropping in a liner. This might be something that would work; I’ll leave that determination to the engineers. However, he installed a rectangular pool that was six feet deep from end to end. Along the rim of the pool was a half pipe of hard plastic, that I believe, in theory, was supposed to join the edge of the pool to the concrete deck. Unfortunately, my uncle never built the concrete deck. Instead his pool sat like a crown on a mountain of mud, with the pool edge about 18 inches higher than the dirt surrounding it. Once you were in, there was nothing to hold onto but this hard plastic edge which was so painful, that you immediately let go to tread water until you were ready for another few seconds holding the rim. The liner inside the pool was so slick that you couldn’t even cling to it with your toes to take a little weight off your poor suffering fingers. What he had created was not so much a pool as a water-filled pit of despair. Thankfully my mother must have noted how little fun we were having, because we only spent one harrowing afternoon in the experimental pool.

My brothers and sisters and I were not the sissy kind of kids who spent their week at the beach swimming in the hotel pool. We were willing to brave the ocean, even though it required much more effort and always ended with one of us face down in the surf. We swam in some extremely questionable lakes and state parks over the years without wondering why the water was brown and/or what exactly was spewing from that pipe further down the beach. But I guess we have always loved pools (other than Uncle Joe’s) because they are so predictable. You don’t need to keep an eye out for rogue waves, you don’t end up with sand in your suit, and except for the occasional confused frog, you don’t encounter any wildlife or aquatic friends that you don’t know.

In the end, we got our pool. I believe I was 24 when my parents bought their first beach house (another demand we made on a regular basis as kids), a townhouse in a development with a community pool. Every summer when we visited, we could walk over to the pool and swim, or sit and have a beer, and pretend the pool was our own. Granted, it was not right out the back door, but it was close enough. And now, my parents’ new home has both an indoor and outdoor pool ready and waiting for the grandkids every time they visit. Some day, probably sooner than I’d like to think, I can take my kids to the pool, pull up a chair, open a beer, and sit and read while they have fun. But for now, they are all too short. They all cling to the side of the pool like we used to, and have a great time as the cement edges scrape their little fingertips. I know how much fun they are having, so from now on, the bathing suits will not get packed away with the summer clothes. In Delaware, the pool will always be open.

Dear ER, Kiss Off!

Note: I did not intend for my blog to be one long rant. I wanted to write about the slug on the rug and other things that I thought were amusing. Unfortunately, people keep pissing me off. So, now I must rant once more, but hopefully tomorrow people will leave me alone to contemplate the more mundane aspects of life.

Is it not enough that we pack up and move every few years? Is it not enough that we must continually introduce our children to new doctors, new dentists, and new schools, not to mention a parade of new friends? Is it not enough that we have to abandon any hope of a career because we will never be anywhere long enough to build one? Is it not enough that our spouses’ business trips take them away for up to a year or more to dangerous places where many of the people they meet want to kill them? Apparently, it is not. Apparently, according to the producers and writers and actors of ER, we must also be portrayed as judgmental, mushy-brained, foot soldiers for Bush. I am speaking, for those of you lucky enough not to know, of the latest episode of ER, where a doctor/military spouse arrives at a military spouse meeting to be belittled for, among other things, having a career, questioning the war in Iraq, and not bringing homemade cookies to the get together.

I have never really thought of myself as the typical military wife. Many military wives were military brats themselves, married young, and had their children soon after. I married my husband when I was 26, having been in the workforce for several years, and stayed on in the workforce for the first 5 years of our marriage. We didn’t have kids until we were in our 30s. We lived off post and socialized with our neighbors and family, and basically I only went onto post on the occasional Friday when I was picking up my husband en route to the beach or some other vacation spot. I didn’t know much about the military aside from what I learned from my time as a defense contractor. When we moved to Kentucky and then on to Virginia, we lived on post and thus became a little more integrated into the military life, but I am still puzzled by the acronyms that some of the other wives toss around at the bus stop. I hope to skate through these last few years before my husband retires without having to learn all of the ins and outs of the military culture. But even as a comparative outsider to the world of military wives, I must object to the portrayal provided by ER.

First and foremost, any group of women (and token man), such as the one portrayed as a military spouse group on ER, is going to have a wide range of opinions on everything. Some women in every random group you gather are going to think that an unblinking devotion to the Commander in Chief is patriotic, and anything less than that is not. Some women in every group are going to have serious reservations about the war in Iraq and what our soldiers are subjected to there. Any group of women will have a few opinionated shrews who will attempt to talk over everyone to convince the room they are right and to refuse to allow other opinions to be heard. Any group of women will have a few self-confident souls who will attempt to moderate a heated discussion that develops when someone takes on one of the opinionated shrews. Oh wait, I mean any group of women except the one gathered on ER last night.

Most military spouses that I have met have a few characteristics that do not depend on her/his position on the ideological spectrum. First, they show support for the men and women whose spouses are deployed. When my husband deployed recently, every other spouse who heard the news greeted me with the same response “If there is anything you need while he is away, please call me.” No one asked me why I didn’t have a big yellow ribbon magnet on my car. Second, they are not generally rude at meetings. Sometimes a group comes together and every one becomes friends, but sometimes the meetings are just that – meetings where you learn information about what is going on the battalion or whatever, and then you leave. Either way, people are polite to each other because they know that they have not joined a cult, but were instead thrown together by circumstance. Third, they are not shocked by the news that spouses have jobs. When I learn that a fellow spouse is lucky enough to have a job, I feel a bit jealous of them, wishing I had chosen a career that was more transportable. Fourth, they don’t sneer at another spouse because she was late to a meeting or didn’t bring “homemade” food. Among my non military friends there are the ones who are always late and the ones who can’t cook – why wouldn’t these people exist among my military friends?

What it comes down to, I guess, is that the spouses and families of soldiers who are deployed or have been deployed before are some of the few people in America who are in touch with the actual war. Every day I can imagine the thoughts that would run through my husband’s head if a bomb went off under his vehicle. I don’t know when or if he could return to normal if he has to kill someone. Not because he is fearful or unprepared, but because he is a person, and a war is not a normal place for a person to be. I know how much he misses me and the kids, how strange it must be to live in a third world country, how being a member of the military can cause so much frustration when you are unable to question some of the things you are told to do. Every day I wonder what I would possibly tell my kids if something happened to their dad. I don’t know when or if they could return to normal. All of this uncertainty is stressful for me and for all spouses, but we can’t wallow in the sadness or anxiety, because life keeps moving on and we are trying to keep things straight at home. But I guess all of this would be too much nuance or background to include in a 60 second bashing like the one on ER last night. Isn’t ER a show about a hospital? Why exactly did they need to take time out to give such a crappy portrayal of military spouses? Why should we be a target? What harm exactly are we causing people? I am not looking for applause or admiration, but I also didn’t think I needed to on guard against an attack from a pretend hospital show.

What burns me most is that some of the people watching that episode will just take it at face value and assume that the Stepfordesque behavior of the spouses on that show are a true representation of the spouses in my neighborhood. I have been forced by my own disgust to write this defense of the military spouse, when that is such a small part of what I consider my identity. I know spouses who are in love with the military and their husband’s career, but even they would not have behaved the way the women did on ER. I don’t watch any shows about the military, mainly because they are so fake that they would not actually reveal anything about the military (hello - JAG?). But from the few bits of television and movies that I have seen, military wives have their personalities removed when they walk down the aisle. We are either submissive, empty-headed trophies or scheming, social-climbing ice queens. Actually, most of us are not any of these things, and I really didn’t think that I would ever feel like I needed to put that on the record.

As for you ER, I’m sure you thought that was a pretty clever 60 seconds, setting up who knows what plot twists for the earnest put-upon doctor. I can only now imagine how many other one-sided portrayals you have put out there that I have just accepted because I had no other information. I’m sure you have scorched countless other groups in pursuit of the story over your long run, and I have sat on my couch and just accepted what you said. Well, I can’t any more. I’m sorry I won’t find out what happens next to all of your characters because I thought this was a pretty good season. I don’t really have a lot of shows that I watch, and with my husband gone, I have plenty of time to watch TV. However, I can’t imagine that you will be doing a follow up show to correct your military spouse smear, and I can’t forgive you, so now I must break up with you.