Everybody’s got a rant. Just probe a little, and you’ll see.
Mine is NPR. Despite fitting the NPR profile to a T, I can’t stand the stuff. Bong bong bong, here’s a poem about a dead leaf. Great, here’s some jazz – oh, sorry, that was just the introduction to another poem about a dead leaf. On my foot. In winter.
Of course, that’s unfair. NPR is a venerable institution. I read many of the same interesting stories in the New York Times, so I don’t feel deprived when my husband tells me about all those fascinating “driveway moments.” But my friends are always amused to elicit my NPR rant, especially among Diane Rheem devotees, who seem to be multiplying by the minute.
My friend Bethany hates jazz. I am sure there is a rant there, but I haven’t heard all of it – probably because she knows I love jazz, though I too dislike that doodly doodly imitation Coltrane stuff, and please don’t tease me with jazz as an introduction to the world news on NPR.
My sister-in-law Alyssa has a great rant. We call it The Cake Rant. It is all about how at birthday parties, graduation parties, and baby showers, everyone raves about the store-bought cake with the lardy super-sweet frosting, but actually this cake is horrible. If you have ever had homemade cake with real homemade frosting with butter and sugar, this store cake is not even close, the worst stuff ever, and she just wants to shout that the emperor has no clothes and this cake is terrible, what are you all raving for!
I just discovered my husband’s secret rant is about key lime pie. Maybe there is something in his family about food and rants, what with the cake rant and now the key lime pie rant. Just get him going. What is the big deal about key limes? Why is this on every menu, even if you’re not in Florida? Who wants a sour pie anyway?
It is a fine line between having a nice therapeutic rant every now and then and becoming a crackpot with a rant a minute. Sometimes politics make some of us feel like ranting non-stop, and about issues that are more pressing than taste in cake and radio stations. The key is to pace yourself, stick to what’s most important, and not rant about everything. It’s like the Boy Who Cried Wolf – is that you, complaining again?
In a political question and answer session, there is always a ranter who turns his question into a ten minute manifesto, as the rest of the audience groans and checks their watches. Then there are the well-meaning folks who speak publicly on an issue – but then misspeak on something big, like race or religion – and everyone feels for them that a public rant was perhaps not the best way to go.
But there is something comforting about a nice private rant among friends, like sharing a secret. Make some cake. Bring on the rants. What gets to you?
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
Paradise Lost
Someday, we may have to sell the Vineyard house.
I said that to my mother the other day, although I felt like a traitor putting the thought into words. It’s a statement loaded with privilege – who has a Vineyard house anyway? – and, at the same time, loss.
Let me explain. In the sixties, my very smart grandfather had the good idea to buy land on Martha’s Vineyard and build a summer home with an ocean view. His family had rented cabins there in summers past. He was a physics professor at Harvard, so Martha’s Vineyard was a natural vacation spot, only a couple of hours away. When my grandfather chose a place, he chose well. There is a private beach for those with houses on the hill where we are. Drive a few minutes in one direction, and you are at a picturesque fishing village. A tiny town can be found the other way down the road. We’re away from the crowds. At least we were.
We can walk up the hill to the cemetery. My mother has started saying she knows more people in the cemetery these days than on the hill. Visitors leave stones and shells and wildflowers for their loved ones. Our plot is in a shaded corner. My grandmother Peg I never met who died suddenly in her sixties after enjoying only one summer in the Vineyard house, my cousin Keith who drowned at the age of 9 (not at the beach as I believed for years, but in a swimming pool in Dayton, Ohio), my uncle who died of cancer and the oddly jarring blank space on the same stone for his widow, still living. And the stone for my grandfather, who made this summer home for his extended family and lived into his nineties. We’re not the sort of people with big fancy gravestones. We’re the sort of people who pick out just the right natural stone, rolling boulders and smaller rocks, part of the landscape, to mark that we were here.
Our house is small, but I never noticed. Then the new people started building their houses bigger and bigger. I wonder what their gravestones will look like.
My mother, my aunts, my cousins, and my brother no doubt have their own Vineyard memories, as I have mine. Childhood adventures with my brother and cousins - fishing expeditions on the pond, sneaking food into the movies, hitchhiking home from the fair when I knew we shouldn’t. My Grandpa’s big birthday parties. Gatherings of neighbors, physicists, New Yorker cartoonists, artists, and writers (my grandfather remarried before I was born, my Grandma Helen, an editor for a New York publishing house), their cigarette smoke, cocktails, and chatter filling the room. Helen’s fabulous cooking. Learning to drive on the dirt roads on the hill. The summer I spent on the Vineyard as a teenager. Walking the beach to get through difficult times, and picturing it when I couldn’t be there. Years later, my husband proposing marriage on that same beach. Burying my beloved grandfather. Now bringing my children to see the ocean and meet old friends.
What started the conversation the other day? My mother informed me that another new resident is building an enormous house, blocking the view of many others, and is importing tall trees to boot. They’re building a swimming pool – a swimming pool! – on the property, despite that there is no municipal water supply and a pond and the ocean are just steps away. The last few times I’ve been to the Vineyard, I worried as much about the massive Mercedes and Lexus SUVs racing down the road as I did about the poison ivy we had to practically jump in to get out of their way as we wandered down to the beach. I can’t relate to the super-rich families I see on the beach these days, their children trampling in the dunes. The middle class owners of my grandfather’s day have sold, died, or are fading away.
I guess I have an old money attitude, but without the money. My family doesn’t want these upstarts spoiling our view, the ones who don’t even know enough to keep their kids off the dunes or board up the windows for a hurricane. We want our privilege, but the way it always has been, the way we inherited it. It’s embarrassing really, but there it is. Or maybe it’s just resentment, because they can afford something we might be losing our grip on. The old summer residents are the Vineyard’s first wife, traded in for a newer, richer, tackier model. And we don’t quite know if we should leave the party and go home.
There is something about holding on to a family house on Martha’s Vineyard when you are not otherwise wealthy. You know you belong (at least you did), but the people around you are perhaps beginning to wonder.
For some people, the Vineyard is all about belonging, and more importantly, showing that you belong. Who owns, who rents, who stays the whole summer, who can only get away for a week or two, who still says Gay Head instead of Aquinnah, who has perfected that Vineyard style of dress – tastefully disheveled with the right color of faded red or blue, like you have just awakened after sleeping on a sailboat, with salt in your hair. Who has the oldest date on their Black Dog shirt. And who is connected enough to know all the new people on the hill.
I don’t see my family fitting in with the nouveau riche crowd. In my generation of cousins, we have a puppeteer, a storyteller, a musician, and a writing teacher. We’re not exactly stockbrokers. We can’t afford to stick around, the intellectuals and artists, I guess. We aren’t rich enough, not in the right way. We haven’t raised our standard of living the way our grandparents did for the next generation; in fact, our trend is downwardly mobile. With the Vineyard house, we might struggle to manage and share the property and its burdens. As it is, the family has to rent it out most of the summer to afford to keep it. The house could someday divide us where once it brought us together.
A decision on selling is a long way off. My mother and her sister manage the house, and it is still a gathering place for family. It will fall to my generation, someday, to decide what to do. A year ago Labor Day the younger generation gathered on the Vineyard. It was magic to see my cousin Josh and my son Jonah playing together, to see my cousin Mark’s daughter reading with my son, my toddler riding the tricycle I rode as a child, to be together the way we all were as kids, and to still have a place to be, with memories filling the room.
We’ll never lose those memories. But I sometimes wonder if there’s still room for us on the Vineyard at all.
I said that to my mother the other day, although I felt like a traitor putting the thought into words. It’s a statement loaded with privilege – who has a Vineyard house anyway? – and, at the same time, loss.
Let me explain. In the sixties, my very smart grandfather had the good idea to buy land on Martha’s Vineyard and build a summer home with an ocean view. His family had rented cabins there in summers past. He was a physics professor at Harvard, so Martha’s Vineyard was a natural vacation spot, only a couple of hours away. When my grandfather chose a place, he chose well. There is a private beach for those with houses on the hill where we are. Drive a few minutes in one direction, and you are at a picturesque fishing village. A tiny town can be found the other way down the road. We’re away from the crowds. At least we were.
We can walk up the hill to the cemetery. My mother has started saying she knows more people in the cemetery these days than on the hill. Visitors leave stones and shells and wildflowers for their loved ones. Our plot is in a shaded corner. My grandmother Peg I never met who died suddenly in her sixties after enjoying only one summer in the Vineyard house, my cousin Keith who drowned at the age of 9 (not at the beach as I believed for years, but in a swimming pool in Dayton, Ohio), my uncle who died of cancer and the oddly jarring blank space on the same stone for his widow, still living. And the stone for my grandfather, who made this summer home for his extended family and lived into his nineties. We’re not the sort of people with big fancy gravestones. We’re the sort of people who pick out just the right natural stone, rolling boulders and smaller rocks, part of the landscape, to mark that we were here.
Our house is small, but I never noticed. Then the new people started building their houses bigger and bigger. I wonder what their gravestones will look like.
My mother, my aunts, my cousins, and my brother no doubt have their own Vineyard memories, as I have mine. Childhood adventures with my brother and cousins - fishing expeditions on the pond, sneaking food into the movies, hitchhiking home from the fair when I knew we shouldn’t. My Grandpa’s big birthday parties. Gatherings of neighbors, physicists, New Yorker cartoonists, artists, and writers (my grandfather remarried before I was born, my Grandma Helen, an editor for a New York publishing house), their cigarette smoke, cocktails, and chatter filling the room. Helen’s fabulous cooking. Learning to drive on the dirt roads on the hill. The summer I spent on the Vineyard as a teenager. Walking the beach to get through difficult times, and picturing it when I couldn’t be there. Years later, my husband proposing marriage on that same beach. Burying my beloved grandfather. Now bringing my children to see the ocean and meet old friends.
What started the conversation the other day? My mother informed me that another new resident is building an enormous house, blocking the view of many others, and is importing tall trees to boot. They’re building a swimming pool – a swimming pool! – on the property, despite that there is no municipal water supply and a pond and the ocean are just steps away. The last few times I’ve been to the Vineyard, I worried as much about the massive Mercedes and Lexus SUVs racing down the road as I did about the poison ivy we had to practically jump in to get out of their way as we wandered down to the beach. I can’t relate to the super-rich families I see on the beach these days, their children trampling in the dunes. The middle class owners of my grandfather’s day have sold, died, or are fading away.
I guess I have an old money attitude, but without the money. My family doesn’t want these upstarts spoiling our view, the ones who don’t even know enough to keep their kids off the dunes or board up the windows for a hurricane. We want our privilege, but the way it always has been, the way we inherited it. It’s embarrassing really, but there it is. Or maybe it’s just resentment, because they can afford something we might be losing our grip on. The old summer residents are the Vineyard’s first wife, traded in for a newer, richer, tackier model. And we don’t quite know if we should leave the party and go home.
There is something about holding on to a family house on Martha’s Vineyard when you are not otherwise wealthy. You know you belong (at least you did), but the people around you are perhaps beginning to wonder.
For some people, the Vineyard is all about belonging, and more importantly, showing that you belong. Who owns, who rents, who stays the whole summer, who can only get away for a week or two, who still says Gay Head instead of Aquinnah, who has perfected that Vineyard style of dress – tastefully disheveled with the right color of faded red or blue, like you have just awakened after sleeping on a sailboat, with salt in your hair. Who has the oldest date on their Black Dog shirt. And who is connected enough to know all the new people on the hill.
I don’t see my family fitting in with the nouveau riche crowd. In my generation of cousins, we have a puppeteer, a storyteller, a musician, and a writing teacher. We’re not exactly stockbrokers. We can’t afford to stick around, the intellectuals and artists, I guess. We aren’t rich enough, not in the right way. We haven’t raised our standard of living the way our grandparents did for the next generation; in fact, our trend is downwardly mobile. With the Vineyard house, we might struggle to manage and share the property and its burdens. As it is, the family has to rent it out most of the summer to afford to keep it. The house could someday divide us where once it brought us together.
A decision on selling is a long way off. My mother and her sister manage the house, and it is still a gathering place for family. It will fall to my generation, someday, to decide what to do. A year ago Labor Day the younger generation gathered on the Vineyard. It was magic to see my cousin Josh and my son Jonah playing together, to see my cousin Mark’s daughter reading with my son, my toddler riding the tricycle I rode as a child, to be together the way we all were as kids, and to still have a place to be, with memories filling the room.
We’ll never lose those memories. But I sometimes wonder if there’s still room for us on the Vineyard at all.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
What Social Contract?
Do the ends justify the means?
Should we finance health care and the arts by taxing cigarettes? Fund schools with lotteries and casinos? Where’s the sin in a few sin taxes?
With sin taxes, we tax the few in order to benefit everyone else. Convenient, since everyone else no longer expects to pay taxes – at least not higher taxes – to receive the benefits of organized, civilized society: good schools, basic services, fine arts.
Yes, ok, but we’re taxing the bad people, the sinners. Or – in preschool mom parlance – the people who make bad choices. If only those folks would make better, more holy choices – well, they could free themselves of the sin tax. Never mind what happens when everyone quits smoking and stops gambling. Just ignore the socio-economic angle to who smokes the most or buys the most lottery tickets. There will always be sinners, after all, and therefore always sins to tax. At least we never have to raise taxes, not the non-sinning kind, the kind on everyone.
When President Bush recently vetoed an expanded children’s health insurance program, only a few critics of the legislation focused on the proposal’s funding source - an increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes. That adds up to a feel-good something for nothing for non-smokers. The Cuyahoga County arts and culture initiative of 2006 was funded by a cigarette tax. It passed – why not? One of the campaign slogans assured voters, “If you don’t smoke, you won’t pay anything for Issue 18.” We want our arts and culture, but please let the people over there pay for it. The ones huddled in the cloud of smoke.
The Republicans and more than a few co-opted Democrats have drilled into the American people that tax money we pay to the government is still our money, even after we pay it, and we should all get a nice chunk of it back every now and then, preferably close to election time. Liberal is a bad name no one wants to be called. A politician who proposes raising taxes might as well start packing his boxes to go back to the farm.
Whatever happened to the notion of citizens contributing so that the government can ensure good schools, necessary health care, durable infrastructure, strong national defense, a healthy environment, a safe and adequate food supply? The idea that we should contribute to our government in order to reap its benefits is extinct. The social contract was dead in America by the end of the twentieth century.
Americans opting out of their democracy (why bother to vote?) isn’t just about taxes. We can say with certainty that there will never be another military draft. Why should everyone have to fight a war or even think about it or grieve about it, when we have other people to do it for us?
So here we are. As bridges fall, soldiers call home to their families for needed equipment their government fails to supply and return to combat zones for lengthy tours of duty, food contamination scares and toxic toys become commonplace, school levies fail, New Orleans is all but abandoned, children fall ill and families lose everything paying for health care – as all this surrounds us, politicians of all stripes promise to cut taxes so Americans can hold onto more of their money.
To be sure, raising taxes or re-instituting the draft would not alone solve our country’s problems. Far from it. But the idea that every citizen – not just the smokers or the enlisted soldiers – should be invested in our democracy, that there is a mutually beneficial and mutually obligatory social contract between the citizen and his government – must return. If it doesn’t, the future looks bleak indeed.
Should we finance health care and the arts by taxing cigarettes? Fund schools with lotteries and casinos? Where’s the sin in a few sin taxes?
With sin taxes, we tax the few in order to benefit everyone else. Convenient, since everyone else no longer expects to pay taxes – at least not higher taxes – to receive the benefits of organized, civilized society: good schools, basic services, fine arts.
Yes, ok, but we’re taxing the bad people, the sinners. Or – in preschool mom parlance – the people who make bad choices. If only those folks would make better, more holy choices – well, they could free themselves of the sin tax. Never mind what happens when everyone quits smoking and stops gambling. Just ignore the socio-economic angle to who smokes the most or buys the most lottery tickets. There will always be sinners, after all, and therefore always sins to tax. At least we never have to raise taxes, not the non-sinning kind, the kind on everyone.
When President Bush recently vetoed an expanded children’s health insurance program, only a few critics of the legislation focused on the proposal’s funding source - an increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes. That adds up to a feel-good something for nothing for non-smokers. The Cuyahoga County arts and culture initiative of 2006 was funded by a cigarette tax. It passed – why not? One of the campaign slogans assured voters, “If you don’t smoke, you won’t pay anything for Issue 18.” We want our arts and culture, but please let the people over there pay for it. The ones huddled in the cloud of smoke.
The Republicans and more than a few co-opted Democrats have drilled into the American people that tax money we pay to the government is still our money, even after we pay it, and we should all get a nice chunk of it back every now and then, preferably close to election time. Liberal is a bad name no one wants to be called. A politician who proposes raising taxes might as well start packing his boxes to go back to the farm.
Whatever happened to the notion of citizens contributing so that the government can ensure good schools, necessary health care, durable infrastructure, strong national defense, a healthy environment, a safe and adequate food supply? The idea that we should contribute to our government in order to reap its benefits is extinct. The social contract was dead in America by the end of the twentieth century.
Americans opting out of their democracy (why bother to vote?) isn’t just about taxes. We can say with certainty that there will never be another military draft. Why should everyone have to fight a war or even think about it or grieve about it, when we have other people to do it for us?
So here we are. As bridges fall, soldiers call home to their families for needed equipment their government fails to supply and return to combat zones for lengthy tours of duty, food contamination scares and toxic toys become commonplace, school levies fail, New Orleans is all but abandoned, children fall ill and families lose everything paying for health care – as all this surrounds us, politicians of all stripes promise to cut taxes so Americans can hold onto more of their money.
To be sure, raising taxes or re-instituting the draft would not alone solve our country’s problems. Far from it. But the idea that every citizen – not just the smokers or the enlisted soldiers – should be invested in our democracy, that there is a mutually beneficial and mutually obligatory social contract between the citizen and his government – must return. If it doesn’t, the future looks bleak indeed.
Monday, January 7, 2008
Cleanliness
Are working mothers messier than stay at home mothers?
A recent study showed that working moms managed to spend just as much time playing with their kids as stay at home moms. So what gives? Housework, of course, as many of us already know from cluttered and dusty experience. Apparently the time sacrificed by working moms is not the all too precious time with their kids, but quality time with their vacuums, dust mops, and sponges.
To be sure, there have always been those working moms who manage to do it all – stellar career, lots of time with the kids, and a sparkling home. What can you say about such people, if they are, in fact, human? Lots more husbands pitch in now too (I simply refuse to vacuum, but my husband actually likes it.) And those who can afford to hire outside help do so in increasing numbers.
But some of us just remain rather, well, messy, and at least we have the career and kids to provide some cover. I am particularly sensitive about my mess; if I had three wishes, one might very well be devoted to cleanliness. Growing up, my mom was the same way. The mess sort of takes over and makes you wonder if you will ever get our from under. Frantic pre-guest cleaning ensues. As that great Internet cleaning guru the Fly Lady says, we suffer from CHAOS – Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome. We at least hope that when we die, we won’t have one of those articles about us that says that the house was “filled with debris,” floor to ceiling of clutter taking over every square inch of space, suffocating the life within.
There are those who truly believe cleanliness is next to godliness. In a cruel parting shot in the break-up of our longtime friendship, a stay at home mother friend emailed me that I was so messy she expected Children and Family Services to take my kids, and I should spend some time picking up my house rather than thinking so highly of myself (and presumably my career). No, I assure you I am not so messy that CFS needs to come by and check up on things. My friend knew I was sensitive about the mess though, and she hit where she knew it would hurt. I suppose it elevated her status as a perfect homemaker to say those things. Would it be better if I cleaned more and played with my children less? Is my failure to attain a picture perfect home just that - failure?
Why can’t we all just get along in these mommy wars? It’s really messy out there, the dried up play-doh, the sticky juice boxes, the overbearing value judgments on both sides. Maybe it is time to clean up our act. Just don’t make me vacuum.
A recent study showed that working moms managed to spend just as much time playing with their kids as stay at home moms. So what gives? Housework, of course, as many of us already know from cluttered and dusty experience. Apparently the time sacrificed by working moms is not the all too precious time with their kids, but quality time with their vacuums, dust mops, and sponges.
To be sure, there have always been those working moms who manage to do it all – stellar career, lots of time with the kids, and a sparkling home. What can you say about such people, if they are, in fact, human? Lots more husbands pitch in now too (I simply refuse to vacuum, but my husband actually likes it.) And those who can afford to hire outside help do so in increasing numbers.
But some of us just remain rather, well, messy, and at least we have the career and kids to provide some cover. I am particularly sensitive about my mess; if I had three wishes, one might very well be devoted to cleanliness. Growing up, my mom was the same way. The mess sort of takes over and makes you wonder if you will ever get our from under. Frantic pre-guest cleaning ensues. As that great Internet cleaning guru the Fly Lady says, we suffer from CHAOS – Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome. We at least hope that when we die, we won’t have one of those articles about us that says that the house was “filled with debris,” floor to ceiling of clutter taking over every square inch of space, suffocating the life within.
There are those who truly believe cleanliness is next to godliness. In a cruel parting shot in the break-up of our longtime friendship, a stay at home mother friend emailed me that I was so messy she expected Children and Family Services to take my kids, and I should spend some time picking up my house rather than thinking so highly of myself (and presumably my career). No, I assure you I am not so messy that CFS needs to come by and check up on things. My friend knew I was sensitive about the mess though, and she hit where she knew it would hurt. I suppose it elevated her status as a perfect homemaker to say those things. Would it be better if I cleaned more and played with my children less? Is my failure to attain a picture perfect home just that - failure?
Why can’t we all just get along in these mommy wars? It’s really messy out there, the dried up play-doh, the sticky juice boxes, the overbearing value judgments on both sides. Maybe it is time to clean up our act. Just don’t make me vacuum.
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