Cold Spaghetti

Today was the second Schweitzer Retreat. We decided as a group to hold the retreat at the Louisiana Renaissance Festival, because why not do something fun?

I don’t have a lot of Renn Fest experience. There is a chance I may have attended the gigantic Maryland Renn Fest in high school… perhaps even on a day when said school was occurring… but well, bad memory runs in the family and my parents occasionally stumble on this website when scoring the internet looking for Roseville Pottery. So let’s just say this was my first Renn Fest.

Yes, they did knock each other off of horses. Which is mild compared to what their respective women did to each other after the guys were finished.

Renn Fest folks like putting ‘e’ or ‘th’ behind every word, sometimes using both at the same time. Like the sign so warmly posted at the exit: “Returneth Soon!” They also are strong believers in boob torture.

We had a wonderful time! The costumes worn by the players and visitors (you can rent yer own garb at the door) were always interesting, often stunning, and occassionally hilarious. Our group met in the morning, doing ‘business’ in a tent for a half our or so, and then had more discussion lakeside in the shade of a tree. And about when Erica noticed the foot-long daddy longlegs crawling across my torso? Yeah, I acted totally cool.

Paul and the kids joined up with us around lunch time. They spent a generous part of the morning with woodworkers, where Will asked a hundred questions about furniture making. Really. As it turns out, when Will wakes up at the crack of dawn and we shove him out of our room begging him to melt his brain with tv while we at least sleep until the sun has risen — well, he goes to the front room, turns on PBS, and watches The Woodsmith Shop.

It was news to me, too.

We spent the rest of the day at the village. The kids played some games and enjoyed some shows (Will loved the jousting, Paul loved the jugglers). The coolest thing, though, were these swings:

I was terrified of Kate going on them. But the Swing-guy assured me at a 15-month old was, “like, totally-th fine-th on the ride,” so I softened. Then noticed that Kate had already walked herself through the gate and was jumping up trying to get on to a swing. Let that nervous-ninny-Mommy get in the way of her doing something Will was doing? Ha!

And so I did my best to take pictures of her, sitting cool as a cucumber, floating and spinning around in the chair. Considering how fast they were whipping around with kids in chairs every few feet, I figured that this panning shot was purdy decent.

We also succumbed to stuff. Will was drooling over the swords even before we walked through the gates. So while I was returning from a solo port-a-potty mission, I visited a wood worker. He told me that his products have a 100-year guarantee “against any wooden weaponry.” I explained that his sister’s head was not wooden, so that the guarantee was not going to apply to us, but good to know. Will was our Knight for the rest of the day.

Here they go, off hunting dragons. Or monsters.

We all did our best to boost the economy. Paul fell for a juggling stick and I picked up a bottle of essence oil (gardenia, although the one marked ‘teen spirit’ was tough to pass up). Kate came away with cute butterfly wings and a matching skirt. The lady I bought it from was way cool and showed me a half-dozen ways to repair the wings in the case of a snag. Then she asked me if I was married.

“Yes.”

“Well, the skirt is made from memory elastic. That means your daughter can wear it during the day, and YOU can wear it at night. Men LOVE it.”

See why I thought this woman was cool?

With all the fun shows, jousting, falcons, and shops (er, shoppes?), we were surprised to find that we spent the whole darn day there. We have never spent the whole darn day anywhere with both kids (that I can think of) and that is just about the best compliment I can give any event.

When we got home weary and dusty from our long hour’s drive back, we found that there was a message on the home phone. From my cell phone. Which is at the office of the Louisiana Renaissance Festival, awaiting pick-up.

Damn. Well, at least someone found it and was nice enough to leave it somewhere safe. Looks like we may be headed back to the 16th century sometime this week.

Question: What is with Kate’s funny, scrunched up smile for the camera?

Answer: I have no idea.

(That’s me and my Mom, Easter 1978 — I’m almost 2 1/2, it’s a few months before my brother was born.)

Despite my illness, we did manage to take the kids Trick-or-Treating. We went to Georgia and Emmy‘s so that the kids could explore the neighborhood en masse and we had enough support to let me rest if and when needed.

Georgia had a great party with yummy food, including delicious chili, homemade mac-n-cheese, and a movie theatre popcorn popper machine dispensing fresh kernels in red and white stripped bags. The kids took turns filling their assorted trick-or-treat bags with party candy and then putting the candy back in the cauldrons.

We got to spend some quality time with baby Ollie. Emmy kept calling him a little peanut while getting the kids in costume (I got to hold and burp the baby). Then she dressed him in his costume — he really WAS a peanut.

Everyone got in some baby time.

Wittle baby peanut!

Will and Kate stripped their impromptu costumes from the day and donned fresh personae: Will was Mike Wicowski from Monsters, Inc (a CCEX find last fall) and Kate wore her gorgeous red suit, a gift from Randy and Katherine on one of their trips to Taiwan.

Will had the Trick-or-Treat thing down this year. No need to prompt or remind, he knew how to negotiate the door knocking and opening, used the correct parlance for transaction, and held his bag or reached appropriately in the right situations. Kate, on the other hand, preferred to take one piece of candy at a time, bringing it in her tight little fist to the next door, where she would offer the kind Treater a trade: new candy for the warm mushed one in her hand. They would offer to fill her bag with candy if she’d hold it open, to which she’d reply, “no thank you.”

Both kids were pretty much ready to be done with the whole thing after one house, just to go eat what they had collected. It wasn’t until we were done that they realized the power of volume. You could actually see Will’s wheels turning as he understood that longevity of the trick-or-treat was a strategic choice. Whoops. He’s asked if we can count down the days ’til next Halloween ’cause he’s REALLY READY NOW.

Here’s a video of them in costume preparing for the Big Event…

My PapPap Charlie was the only child of a rough, Swedish woman. He was well into his forties, unmarried, and childless when he met my divorced Grandma in their jobs at the Department of Commerce. He was quiet, having suffered great abuses as a POW during the Korean War, and whether due to this trauma or his peculiar personality, was incredibly socially awkward. He loved classical music almost as much as he adored my vivacious, life-of-the party Grandma, who seemed to be the light that saved him from his Charlie Brown-like days and thrust him into the wild world of our family. He died of a massive heart attack when I was 10, but my Grandma tells me that before he died, I won his heart.

Oblivious to the awkwardness he had with children, I embraced him with the all assumed adoration of a grandchild. I followed him around, chattering through the sounds of gentle classical music, invading his space when he went to be alone in his basement retreat. Years later, Grandma Betty would tell me that these were the highlights of his life. That he would sit perfectly still and simply listen, puffing away on his cigar, terrified of doing or saying anything that might offend and cause me to leave. He was in awe of me with absolutely no idea of what to do or say, so he simply sat and took in all my chatter and energy with patience and surprise.

Later, when Grandma Betty and I became roommates during my high school days, she filled these stories with more intimate ones about their marriage. Describing how he made her feel and the things that made their relationship special. My favorite antic dotes were the ones that showed Charlie’s softer side, the jokes that made my Grandma laugh. He had a dry humor with a curmudgeon twist, and like my own husband, made jokes from words.

For example, a historical time or place, to Charlie, was an** “hysterical” time or place. Gettysburg, or the Fourth of July, or the Declaration of Independence were all “hysterical” parts of U.S. History. He described the Old Presbyterian Meeting House in Alexandria, Virginia, the place where my Grandmother chose to have me, her first grandchild, baptized, as “a hysterical church.”

So when I approached the polls this morning and entered my vote, PapPap Charlie was foremost in my mind. I could not shake the thought of how hysterical the moment was, that I was casting a hysterical ballot on a hysterical day, a day that will go down in hysterics. I think about telling my grandchildren about what it was like to participate in the election of 2008, of getting to vote for the first Black President of our country. About how good it felt, as if our country and indeed, the world, was at a turning point and suddenly the winds were picking up to bring us back to a place of safety and honor. I wonder if they will be awed to think that I was a part of such a hysterical day.

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* Just in case someone wonder about the grammar here, I looked it up. Using ‘an’ before a word starting with the letter ‘h’ is reserved for when the word has a silent h sound… ‘an honor’, versus ‘a horse’.

** Okay, I know the rule. But really, doesn’t “an” just sound better??

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UPDATE: It seems my parents found the new blog. I know because they’ve called me several times a day over the past two days to dump on me offer rewrites for my posts. (Hi, Mom!)

My Grandma Betty was known to weave a few tails… and as the first grandchild and one who lived with her for a solid year to finish high school and then again off and on while I worked in the area after college… I was the one who heard her stories. Charlie worked a desk job in the Navy and never was a POW — these were Grandma’s embellishments. The whole thing is very Grandma Betty. I wonder if she wanted to jazz up his past for her own enjoyment, or to simply make a dull story more interesting, or if it was her way of making him seem more memorable to me. She knew early on that if anyone was going to keep our family stories alive, it would be me; Grandma was aware of the need to leave a verbal legacy through me.

So Grandma made up information about Charlie’s past. Really, I think it’s sweet. A testiment to how much she cared for him, that years after his death she would weave danger and mystery into the gentle, quiet, and reserved man she loved. So Charlie wasn’t a POW, he didn’t become ill in Korea (the story was that he contracted some type of illness and was denied medical attention while a POW), and had job with a Navy supplies department. That’s one story. The other one is of an ordinary man who was loved so much by a vivacious woman who saw him as her hero. That’s the story I like best.

While in Pittsburgh last weekend, we (Paul, me, the kids, and my Dad) visited the fantastic Carnegie Science Center. The Center is one of the nicest of it’s kind that I’ve ever seen, with wonderful science exhibits, an incredible under 5 play space with clever kid-sized machines, and a WWII submarine in the river. My Dad was a submarine guy in the Navy, so this was a must-see stop on our Museum tour.

So it was interesting to visit this submarine with my Dad. (A note: the structure on the top of the hull is the sail… it’s much bigger than one would think.)

My Dad sacrificed quite a bit to work with subs. As the story goes, Dad graduated from the Naval Academy an okay student and was sent to Pensacola for flight school, where he was at the top of his class. But he wanted to go to sub school, so he applied to the Navy’s school for sub training, in Groton, Connecticut. He didn’t get in. A year went by and he applied again. He didn’t get in. At this point, his superior officer brought him in and said that the fact that their star pupil was repeatedly applying for sub school was making their flight program — in itself a top program — look bad. He delivered a warning: if my Dad were to apply again for sub school and not be accepted, they’d have to kick him out, sending him to surface duty in Hawaii (to the undesirable post no one wanted.) I was born about a year later in Pearl Harbor, which explains what happened on his third try.

So while Dad completed his long tours at sea, leaving my Mom alone with me as an infant on an island in the middle of the Pacific thousands of miles from everyone she’d ever known, he continued to dream of subs. He figured he needed more education, so he managed to get accepted (after two tries, if I remember right) to a Master’s program the Navy had with M.I.T. We moved to Boston, where my brother was born, and where Dad studied Ocean and Mechanical Engineering in between playing Candyland games with me. After three years in the program, we moved to South Carolina, where he had more surface duty and repair work. Finally, a few years into his Charleston service, he was accepted to the program in Groton. I remember visiting him at school… the drive up from South Carolina, swimming in a New England lake (it was cold and gross) and going to see Ghostbusters at a movie theatre. Once he came back from sub training, he did repairs on nuclear subs of all kinds and often went out to sea with them to monitor the repairs. Being at sea then was very different from now, with internet and phones and more detailed systems of family communications. When I was a kid and Dad was at sea, there was no contact, no information. I remember asking about where he was, wondering why we couldn’t call him or send letters. It was puzzling and we missed him. I knew that he was under the ocean, but the thought was too strange to really understand. Honestly, I did not think that it had much of an impact on me until the Kursk sank in 2000; when I had nightmares about my Dad for more than a week. I realized then that his being under the water in a silent, heavy, capsule had a great impact on me, lighting fears that I never knew I had.

So with all that history, I was excited about getting to see the sub with him. I guess I thought it might let me get a vision of what the majesty of submarining meant for him, this thing he worked so hard to be a part of — the life he led when he was not with us. A military family is a family that understands sacrifice; it’s what we do everyday. I thought maybe I’d get an idea of what that sacrifice was all about.

We entered in the front of the sub, into the torpedo room. A volunteer from the Center was there to answer questions; he had served on nuclear submarines, he told us through a very heavy Russian accent.

“Really?” my Dad said, “I served on many nucs, myself. Which ship did you serve?”

“I am not at liberty to say.”

My Dad looked at us with a goofy grin. He’s good with a game.

“Okay, which class?”

“No, I cannot tell you.”

“Wait,” says my Dad, “which SIDE?”

“Zee other one,” Mr. Retired Russian Submariner says. My Dad jovially answers, “Yeah, I thought so. I recognized your voice. Heard you over the radio. We always knew where you were.”

He’s joking, it’s his way of being nice and it is. Paul asks the Russian guy a thoughtful question, which he also evades, and I sort of drown out the sound. It hits me that all those days and weeks and months at sea were much more serious than I really had ever considered. It was during the Cold War. They were out listening and monitoring as War Games. My Dad is an engineer, he fixes anything that runs on water — things I had never connected with images of conflict, despite the purposes of the machines he occupied. The human weight of it, the risks, the threats, and how it fits into my love of peace… these are bigger pieces I’ve not really let myself ponder. I’d always thought of my Dad as an engineer more than a sailor, machine geek more than soldier. I wonder, is that how he saw himself, too?

Covering the walls of the torpedo room and every available space otherwise, are large cans of ketchup, relish, and chili sauce. Bright and happy cans lining shelves above huge torpedoes. Everything in a submarine is back to back on a line between what you need to stay alive and what could kill you. Even the smell of diesel, what my Dad called ‘the smell of a submarine,’ is a constant reminder of the metal at work around you. The taste of the air was like taking in a piece of the machine with every breath. I got the sense that if you were down there long enough, you would breath in so much of her that you would be forever locked in her service. Like a first love you can’t forget.

The tiny sub packed in three movies for it’s sailors to watch in the mess deck (the kitchen). They hoped to meet up with another sub to trade movies when in port… otherwise, they were back at sea with the same picks. When they grew tired of the repetition, they played the reels silently and made up alternative words (the inspiration for Science Mystery Theatre 2000). Living quarters consist of a bunk with storage under the mattress for the crew, with closet-like spaciousness for the commanding officer. My Dad is over 6 feet tall and thick with muscle; there is no where on a submarine where he comes close to fitting. I watched him struggle through the doorways and tried to imagine a hurried fleet of men rushing through during an emergency maneuver. I couldn’t.

Still, he walked through that ship like a kid in a candy store. Pouring over the thousands of dials, reading the diagrams that framed the walls. I admit, the engineering of it all is astounding. But the physical experience? The heat, the steam, the sweat — all of the discomforts that were so obviously part of the experience of the men who served — if these were on his mind he didn’t share it. He seemed generally enthralled with how it all worked, how it provided the foundation for the vessels he would later repair and deploy upon.

The tour gave me even more appreciation for those who go into military service, who rise to the occasion to do things that I could not bear to think about, let alone do. And an increased wonder for my Dad, this mysterious guy who worked for years for the opportunity to be a part of the most physically uncomfortable and psychologically terrifying calls to duty that I can imagine.

Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t get a chance to make Will’s spider costume. Because Will may have been cool with the whole spider-thing, but Kate has absolutely no interest in her Little Miss Moffett bonnet. Will, on the other hand, was thrilled to pose with it.

Is that a seriously nice bonnet or what? And for $8. You can get one made in any fabric you can think of from here. Sheesh, makes me want to wear a bonnet, too.

Maybe next year?

Do you know what the room of a 4- and 2- year old looks like after a morning searching for costumes to wear to school? It’s not pretty.

But we pulled it off. Thankfully, I’d picked up some sale items over the past few years… including a cowgirl hat and cowgirl boots. Both of these were purchased on outings when Paul was not around to glare disapprovingly. I am using this as an example of my Good Shopping Skills, which have now proven themselves to be Very Valuable in a pinch.

Along with a horse-y shirt, Kate became a cowgirl! We worked on “Yee-haw!” all morning. At 9:30, we joined her at school for a little Halloween party.

She was quick to find many good uses for her cowgirl hat. “Daddy? What do you mean I can’t have a pony?!”

Then they had a puppet show. Kate walked herself upstairs and sat in the front row, without thinking twice about her parents, stuck in the back with the babies (they were a little freaked out by the intense cheese brought by the puppet man.) Luck for him, Kate LOVES cheese. All kinds. She ate it all up and especially liked the guy’s cat, Dinah. (His ghost was named Blythe. Chuckle, chuckle.)

She just took it all in, wild horsewoman that she is.

And seriously, it took honest effort.

She didn’t even notice us leave after the performance. She is SO OVER us!

Then, at 2, we visited Will’s BATMAN’s school. He was cruisin’ the play-yard in his Batmobile.

Inside, the kids’ artwork decorated the cafeteria. That face in the center is the work of Batman, himself.

Then, the Kindergarten put on a Maori-inspired song and dance, wearing Maori-inspired skirts that they made. (Their study of Australia has branched out to New Zealand.)

We figured Will did pretty well with the words and movements, considering he’d missed three days of school recently for our trip north.

His favorite part was “aou, aou, aou, aou-aou-aou!”

After their performance, guess who was waiting? Yup, same guy from the morning. His shtick went great with the older crowd, though. And when he needed a BAT, guess who got called up?

See that handsome guy in the background? He recorded it all. A prince among men, I tell ya.

Thanks to Paul’s recording prowess, here’s an incredibly reduced-quality video of the Maori-song and dance. My favorite part is when Will hitches up his pants about 50 seconds in. AOU!

When I was a kid, my Dad was away a lot. As a good Navy family, my Mom, Grandmother, brother, and I would adapt our holidays as needed to when Dad was around. Celebrate a birthday a few months late. Hunt for eggs on an odd day. The calendar was secondary to us being able to be together as a family.

So now I am a Mother of two and it’s the day before Halloween and I am sick. Like, had to go and suck down medicine in a tube in an Urgent Care sick. It’s a head cold turned bronchitis with some sort of nasty sit-on-your-chest-til-ya-wheeze side effect. I’m hawked up on a bunch of steroids and antibiotics and inhalers, weak in the knees and in bed while Paul — poor Paul — handles his job, our kids, and a whole house of cards just tumbling down, one by one, on his hurting head.

Halloween could not come at a worse time. The spider costume isn’t made (I bought the toilet seat covers for the spider body and have the black tights for legs). Will is going to wear his Batman pajamas to school tomorrow — at his request, chosen over my initial offer of his last-year’s Peter Pan — and Kate? Well, she was suppose to be the Little Miss Moffett to Will’s spider, wearing a simple blue dress that is in no way costume-y, but paired with a bonnet (this woman is amazing), and a little sign about ‘curds and whey,’ I figured we could make work. But for school tomorrow? I didn’t think about this. I wonder if last year’s Tinkerbell still fits her? (It’s 12 months size… unlikely.)

Are we the world’s worst parents if we forgo Halloween?

Can we turn it into a belated punishment for all that not-listening in weeks past? (Okay, I admit, this seems unduly evil.)

But what if we just can’t do it? What other options do we have?

At Will’s first camp performance this summer, I brought our video camera to record the class song.  The camera was bought new in November 2003, the week before Will was born.  While sitting in the audience waiting for the class to file in, a grade-school age boy turned around, saw the recorder in my hand, and exclaimed, “What is THAT??”

“It’s a video camera,” I explained straightford.

“REALLY?” he said, “But it’s SO HUGE!”

Point taken, the Hi8 tape thing was getting old.  Mastering video and all that nonsense is a pain.  But I’m addicted to photography, not videography, and have done my best to try to put all responsibility in that second category to Paul.

Who has came through.

On Monday, a surprise arrived in the mail.  With a big family event coming up in the next few weeks, Paul recognized the importance and wanted us to be prepared.  So he took it upon himself to research and buy a great new camera… completely surprising me.   We used it for the first time yesterday and tonight and here is one of our first videos.  Importing it into IMovie and Sharing it to YouTube could not have been easier!

Oh, and the kids got haircuts today.  Although it’s not an issue that will keep me up at night, I do think it’s interesting that there is some debate about the gender-specificity of Kate’s haircut.  Will said “she looked like a boy,” and thought it hysterical when I showed him a picture of me with my super-short Suzanne Powter haircut (cute cut, but not enough product in the world to hold my fine hair).  As for Kate, I think she looks adorable anytime we get to see her eyebrows.  But I am curious to others’ impressions?  And if you find it unattractive, are there suggestions on how else I could cut her super-straight hair?