Gardening

I thought I’d try this thing where I work on one thing at a time, and stick with it until it’s finished, rather than writing a few paragraphs of one thing and then a few paragraphs of another and sometimes leaving something for so long that I forget what I was even thinking about when I started writing it and then having to discard it altogether. Because I hate when that happens. But I might never finish the other thing I’m writing now. I just read the page that I wrote and I find that I don’t care enough about it to try to finish it. That happens sometimes too. 

It’s the middle of May here in Maryland and unlike the last two Mays, it’s actually warm, though we have had a ton of rain. My neighborhood is a riot of growth. Even the houses with the lawns that tend to be perfectly manicured and the gardens that are generally well-tended are looking a little straggly right now. And my house looks very straggly. No one has had time to cut the grass for over a week and as for the garden? It’s a mess, and it’s likely to stay that way for a bit. I’m not a gardener. Sometimes I wish I was but I hate dirt too much to go around digging in it.  

I am a neat person, but I'm not a fanatic. I'm not a germaphobe. I do hate to touch anything sticky or slimy (especially the latter) but that's not why I hate dirt. Or soil, really. It's soil that I hate. Soil reminds me that I am alienated from nature. It reminds me that I'm a creature of modern life, totally dependent on technology and man-made infrastructure. It reminds me that if I were to be dropped into the wilderness with nothing but my own wits, I'd be a goner. 

So I hate dirt, and its smug little face sneering at me and laughing at my incompetence. I don't need to grow anything. If I need food I will buy it at the grocery store. If I need any flowers that don't already grow in my garden, I will go to a florist. Or I will look at my neighbors' lovely gardens. I don't need you, dirt. 

But still, I watch people who garden and I envy them a bit. I envy their beautiful gardens but even more than their gardens, I envy their competence. It must be nice to be so connected to the earth that you know exactly what to do to make things grow. Where do you dig the holes, I always think. Should you look for a sunny spot, or is shade better? I mean, I can look around and see where it’s sunny or shady, but am I supposed to know exactly where the sun will shine on each corner of my garden at any given time of day? I’ve lived here for 17 years, but I couldn’t tell you what corner of my property is sunny at 10 am or 4 pm. I’m not that observant. I don’t know when to water things, or how much, or if I even should water things. It rains quite a lot here, after all. Maybe that’s all the water the plants need. 

Of course, I know that all of this information is available for the asking. I can buy potted plants or seeds, and read the instructions. I can walk around the house and make notes on sunny and shady spots at various times of day. I can do a little bit of internet research to find out what kind of soil we have around here. But I probably won’t do any of that. If I’m going to work 40-plus hours a week, do three different volunteer jobs, keep a clean house, read books, grocery shop for my old lady (I own her now; I know this) and still have time to sit around writing about how little time I have, then there’s no time for gardening. 

*****

Pretty often, I think about something that happened in the past, and I look at my notes or my calendar or this blog, and I find that the thing that I’m remembering happened exactly one year or two years or five years in the past. The weather and the position of the sun relative to the earth and the smell of certain flowers or certain leaves about to shed and turn themselves into mulch, or a soft balminess (or an icy sharpness depending on the season) in the air all conspire to remind me. 

Hey, maybe I’m more connected to nature than I thought. 

It was just shy of one year ago that I wrote about walking around my neighborhood on the first summer-hot evening of the year, just as an enormous brood of 17-year cicadas emerged from its underground lair. Those cicadas took over our lives for about three or four weeks, and then they were gone, and I mean GONE, just as quickly as they came, leaving me wondering, did that even happen? Did I really just live the last few weeks of my life in a swirling cyclone of flying insects? Did I really just swim laps in a pool that was nothing more than a fucking cicada Viking funeral? 

This is apropos of nothing other than gratitude of the “at least” variety. This year is very different from last year; better in some ways and worse in others. Last year I didn’t have to worry about gas prices (and not only because I never drove anywhere) but this year, at least, I don’t have to worry about stepping on a cluster of dead or dying cicadas. And I don’t have to see them again for another 16 years. I’ll be old by then. 

So I started this by resolving to write only one thing at a time, and then I had a few other ideas that I really can’t work into this little post, so now I have even more drafts in progress than I had before. I’m not going to worry about that anymore.  And shall I tell you what else I’m not going to worry about anymore? Gardening. The inside of the house is neat and clean and I can’t bother myself about the state of the flower beds and the length and quality of the grass. And of course I still hate dirt. 

Remnants

It's the third day of school here in Montgomery County, and we already have an early dismissal. The "remnants" of Hurricane Ida are expected to drop on us in a few hours, and the County deemed it wise to get school traffic off the roads early. Good decision. I'm in my car in the parking lot of the church across the street from Rockville High School, avoiding the combined craziness of first week of school traffic and unexpected early dismissal traffic. This is my 7th year as a Rockville parent, and so I know my way around. It's nice to have experience. 

Right now, it's just cloudy. We had very heavy rain overnight, accompanied by thunder and lightning. I awoke to alerts proclaiming flash flood and tornado watches. A tornado seems unlikely but there were some serious flash floods last night. A person died. God rest his soul. 

The church parking lot is filling up a bit. It’s still mostly empty, and I can see the gridlocked parking lot at the school across the street, so I still think that this is the right place to be, but I do hope that word doesn't get out. I'd like for this little pickup traffic workaround to remain an exclusive privilege for the old-timers. Experience should come with a few perks. 

*****

"Remnants" is such an interesting word choice. It's apt, I guess. It means left over, or left behind. It's a pile of fabric scraps, left raggedy on the sewing room floor. It's the remainder of the faithful, staying behind to save the rest of humanity or maybe to destroy it. It’s what’s left after a catastrophe. Does that make the word a synecdoche in the context of a storm? The remnant as the part of the storm that represents the whole? That is stretching it, I think. But still, the word choice is apt, when every end of August and beginning of September seems more dramatic and apocalyptic than the last. Summer ends and school begins and storms threaten and then they materialize and destroy everything in their path. People awaken to smartphones delivering flash flood and tornado and wildfire warnings. Planes fly into buildings. Wars begin and end. Nine unelected people decide the fate of millions. And the air outside my neighborhood Starbucks positively reeks of pumpkin spice. 

*****

We never did see much of the remnant here in Maryland. NYC and my hometown of Philadelphia suffered major flooding but it just rained here. 

I feel like we're overdue for a disaster. That's really just me, I think. I'm always planning for the worst case scenario, and I don't trust good fortune, especially long stretches of good fortune. Natural disaster-wise, we have dodged the proverbial bullet for a long time, and I can't help but wonder when our luck will run out. That’s just me. I don’t just borrow trouble. I borrow it from loan sharks and payday lenders at 25 percent, compounded daily. 

But maybe four years of Trump was our disaster, and that's why the Lord has mercy on us. Anyway it's two days later and I'm back in the church parking lot, where my other stretch of luck might be running out. The place is filling up and it's not even 2:30 yet. The word is out. Someone decided to share this little Rockville life hack with the whole town, and now half of the PTSA is sitting in my little private waiting area, engines running. Well, it couldn't last forever. Nothing lasts forever, not even the first week of school. My son is walking across the street now, so it’s time to go home. 

Grid

Last Monday was a work holiday, so I slept a little later than usual; all the way until 7:30 AM, in fact. Everyone else was off, too, but they all like to sleep late, so I had the house to myself. I made coffee, and I settled on the couch to stream a British detective show, and I thought about how much I appreciate a paid holiday, one of the greatest gifts of the labor movement of the 20th century. 

And then the power went out. 

It always feels so abrupt when the power goes out. Everything shuts down or off, all at once, before you even have time to react. And you notice how much noise you’ve become accustomed to, because a house without power is a very quiet house. 

My first thought was “Thank God I already made my coffee,” and then my second thought was that I’d text my friends to see if it was just me, or if the rest of the neighborhood was out. My friend Erin texted first, and that’s how we knew that it was the whole street. I checked the power company’s website. They already knew about the outage, a thousand customers were affected, and they expected to restore power by 9 AM. And they did. I was reading a book and texting with my friends, and the power came back on as suddenly as it had gone out. Everything sounded normal again. The whole thing was done and over in less than an hour. 

Last Monday was a nice day, and the outage wasn’t weather-related. It was apparently human-caused; an error that accidentally cut the switch or the transformer or the circuit or whatever the thing is that carries the power to the affected homes and businesses. The power company’s update on the outage admitted as much. Imagine that--they made a mistake, they admitted they made a mistake, they got to work immediately to fix the mistake, and then they actually did fix it, in practically no time. When the lights came back on, the coffee in the coffee pot was still warm. 

*****

I don’t want to get into the politics of what’s happening in Texas. Well OK, maybe for a minute. It was the Green New Deal! Really, Governor Abbott? And Ted Cruz--really? REALLY? OK, that’s all. 

Politics aside, I have been thinking about this a lot during these last few days, and not just because it’s been all over the news. It’s because I think a lot about everything we depend on, and how easily it can all fall apart. I flip a switch and voila--light! I turn the handle on a faucet and clear water streams forth, stopping only when I tell it to stop. My car runs out of gas and I go to the gas station and fill it back up; and we eat food, and then I drive my car to the grocery store and restock the kitchen. Most people take all of this for granted. I don’t take it for granted. That is not because I’m a better and more thoughtful person but because I’m a compulsive worrier. I worry about everything. I worry that things will fall apart, that the center won’t hold. 

OK, now that’s REALLY the last time you’ll ever see me paraphrase Yeats. 

It’s all very fragile, the whole thing--the power grid, water systems, the Internet, the transportation infrastructure that allows things and people to move freely from place to place so that we can drive our cars to nearby stores and buy everything we need. It can all go away, and very quickly. Just one disaster, one cyberattack, and the whole thing is kaput.  

Kaput, I tell you. Even now, I worry. Most people in Texas have power again; but apparently, many people who didn’t lose their power in the first place are receiving five-figure electric bills because the free market or whatever. It’s snowing again here, snow mixed with sleet that is making everything icy cold and that could easily weigh down the power lines and shut down the electric power; and that could easily make the roads impassable, thus making it impossible for delivery trucks to restock the stores that we all depend on for food and household supplies. 

*****

I like to think of myself as a resourceful, flexible, fearless person who can adapt to any circumstance, roll with the punches, and turn lemons into lemonade. But that’s totally ridiculous, of course, because I am exactly the opposite of that and if we find ourselves in a Texas-like crisis here in Maryland, I’ll start panicking and lose my shit within the hour. 

OK, maybe within a day. We have seen how I handled an unexpected power outage of less than an hour’s duration with total aplomb, and I bet that I can sustain that devil-may-care attitude for as long as six hours. After that, I make no promises. 

They DO have eyes...

I’ve always wanted to write something that would give me an excuse to use the term “murder of crows.” But did I want that excuse to be an actual murder of crows colonizing my front lawn? No. No, I did not. But we don't always get to choose the circumstances under which we get to write about crows. We don't invite them. They just show up. 

And two days or so ago, they did show up, in considerable numbers. I heard them before I saw them. They were screeching or squawking or whatever crows do, and I could tell that there were more than a few crows making that racket. So I decided to investigate, and holy crow. A murder of crows, whose specific number can be best described by the word “shitload,” were swirling around my front lawn, helping themselves to birdseed that was never intended for them and just generally making a nuisance of themselves. The sky was literally almost black on an otherwise sunny day. It was creepy, I tell you what. Creepy, and more than a little menacing. 

The crows swooped and dipped, landing on low branches and on the grass, pecking around for seeds or worms or whatever it was that attracted them in the first place; and then one of them strutted up the driveway, bold as brass, looking for all the world as if he were going to march up and ring the front doorbell. Maybe the bird feeder was empty, and he wanted to complain. Maybe he wanted directions. Maybe he wanted to ask if the house was for sale. 

What are the schools like? (Image: Wikipedia)

And it would have been, if those crows hadn’t cleared the hell out of here. But they did. They flew out almost as abruptly as they arrived. I don’t know if that’s because they got what they came for, or because they didn’t, but that’s their business. I wish them the best in their crowish pursuits, as long as they pursue those pursuits in some other location.  

A week off

August 8: We're going on vacation today, against my better judgment and definitely against my inclination to follow the rules and stay under the radar. We're going to New Jersey, which has travel restrictions against residents of over 30 states, including Maryland. This is crazy because Maryland is outperforming Pennsylvania in almost every COVID metric, but Pennsylvanians are free to cross the Delaware River into New Jersey without quarantining for two weeks, and Marylanders are not. But the travel restriction is actually an advisory: "Voluntary, but compliance is expected." No one seems to know what this extremely equivocal language means, and my research indicated that the state is not enforcing the quarantine requirement, and we paid a lot of money for this beach rental, so we're taking the risk. We're just about to get on the road now. The car is packed with the bikes are securely fastened to the rack. The weather is cloudy and unsettled, much like my mood. We're not sure about today, the weather and I. We'll see how it goes. We'll see what happens. 

Leaving the state feels like leaving the country. Every state has its own rules now. I feel like I need to make sure my papers are in order. But that's the least of my worries because my papers are always in order. My mental health is suspect but my documents are impeccable. 

We're driving through Baltimore now. This is the furthest I've been from home since March. It all looks the same. The Baltimore Sun printing plant and the Port of Baltimore on my right and the Domino Sugar sign and Fort McHenry on my left. I don't know Baltimore as well as I should considering that it's so close to where I live. I like it, though. I could live here. But I'm just passing through today. 

*****

We crossed the Delaware Memorial Bridge about an hour ago, and now we're almost there, and it might be a good week after all. No checkpoints and no COVID quarantine warnings. Other than face masks in the Wawa near Elmer, I have seen blessedly few indications that this Saturday in August is different from any other. Less traffic, maybe. It's still cloudy. It might rain, but I don't care. The ocean is good, rain or shine. 

*****

Sunday, August 9. In memory of Mary Jervis. She enjoyed life's small moments. 

That's the inscription on a memorial park bench on the promenade at 82nd Street in Avalon. No dates or other details--Mary Jervis could have been someone's wife or mother or sister or friend--probably all of the above--but we don't know how she died or when or at what age, or who commissioned the memorial bench. We only know that she was known as a person who enjoyed life's small moments. It's a good way to be remembered. 

It's our first full day at the beach, hot and sunny and intensely humid, and that's the way I like it. My niece and nephew are digging in the sand, carefree as only small children can be, even though they are aware of the pandemic. My 4-year-old niece has a beloved stuffed dog named Puppy. This morning, she told me to be careful with Puppy. "He might have da coronavirus." 

*****

Monday, August 10. It's day 3 at the beach and I’m writing on my Chromebook, not my phone. Sadly, it took me 15 minutes to remember how to connect this thing to a new Wi-Fi network. I’m turning into a GEICO commercial. Well, no one is getting any younger, and I’m up and running, so I’m holding off senility for now. For now. 

We're staying in the same little condo complex where we stayed last year, in a different unit. Someone is building a house next door, so the little sliver of bay view that we had from the 2nd floor deck is gone, unless you stand up and lean out a bit. I find that I don’t mind standing up and leaning out. 

It’s 9:30 in the morning. When I woke up, just before 8, a thick fog made everything look milky and indistinctly white. Now the sun is trying to burn the fog away, but the fog is holding on. The sky is uniformly pale blue gray, just a little lighter than the pale blue gray color of most of the houses here.

It’s trash morning. The rumbling garbage trucks and the construction noise are here to remind the tourists that this place doesn’t exist just as a holiday retreat for them. It’s an actual town with roads and infrastructure and a supply chain and a sanitation system. But we’ll be on the beach in a few hours, and we’ll forget all about that. 

*****

Tuesday, August 11. There's an Italian restaurant called Borghi's on 82nd Street in Stone Harbor, NJ. It's been there for a long time. We usually stay right around the corner from Borghi's, and I ride my bike past it every morning. Sometimes I stop and look at the menu, thinking that it looks like a nice place, and maybe we'll eat there some night this week. But the week always passes by very quickly. Before I know it, it's Friday night and we're leaving the next morning and we never did get around to eating at Borghi's. Maybe next summer, I'll think to myself as we drive past it on our way out of town.

It occurred to me this morning that there are a lot of things to do in a week, a lot of places to go, a lot of charming little corner restaurants with old-fashioned awnings and Chianti bottle candlesticks and I might not get to all of them, not this week and maybe not ever. Vacation is a good reminder that life is short and you might not have time to do everything you want to do. Or is that just me? That might be just me. 

*****

Wednesday, August 12. Wednesday of beach week is always a turning point. On Sunday, it feels like the week will last forever. All the time in the world, I will think to myself as I try to decide where we'll have dinner and where to ride our bikes and what books to read. On Monday, it feels like the week might even be a little bit too long. It's exhausting dragging all of the beach stuff, along with two little children (my nephew and niece) to and from the beach; and the back and forth about after beach plans and washing the towels vs. letting them hang out to dry seems more like work than work. But then by Tuesday, beach schlepping has become a manageable daily routine. Wednesday is when the near-term nostalgia begins. It was just three days ago when we packed up for the first day on the beach, I will think. Oh, and remember Monday, when we rode down to 96th Street after the beach and then ate pizza for dinner? All of a sudden, it's Thursday and it feels like time is running out, because time actually is running out. 

*****

Thursday, August 13. This morning, I rode my bike around the island, fantasy house shopping while still reassuring myself of my superior moral virtue. I don't need an extravagant sprawling Avalon mansion with dormer windows and multiple decks and awnings and pergolas and exquisite little flower beds bordering neat pebble walkways, I think. Just a nice little million dollar beach cottage would be more than enough. My face, I imagine, radiates with smug, slap-me self-satisfaction as I congratulate myself for not being greedy like the rest of these bitches. 

But I am greedy, as much as and even more than the rest of these bitches. This morning, my nephew asked me if we can come again next summer and stay for two years. That seems about right. I want more bike rides and more browsing visits to twee little beach boutiques and more swimming and wave jumping and more coffee on the deck and more reading and definitely more pizza. Two years might be enough. 

It's foggy on the beach today. The sun still feels warm overhead, though it's barely visible. If not for the beach umbrellas and cabanas and people in colorful swimwear, the whole place, sea and sun and sky, would blend into one canvas of milky pale blue gray framed with pale green dune grass, and lit by the barest glow of pale yellow sun. The lifeguards probably hate days like this. It's hard to see the people in the water. But I love days like this. 

It's Thursday. I don't have two more years. I will have to settle for just barely two more days. 

*****

Friday, August 14. If Wednesday is the turning point and Thursday is the point of no return, then Friday is the last stand. My son and I went bike riding this morning and island traffic was like Manhattan on Christmas Eve. People buzzed about in a frenzy, determined to cram everything into their last day of vacation. One more morning bike ride, one more walk to the bay, one more coffee and muffin, one more poke around the shops, one more day of nothing in particular, but near the ocean. The whole scene had a desperate, time-running-out quality that was simultaneously funny and sad. 

I've been coming here for a long time, and I find something new every time. There's always a new view that I've never seen before, or a section of beach that I haven't visited or some nice flat quiet length of road where I haven't ridden my bike. I bring home new memories with the old ones and they all become part of summer. 

*****

We shopped a bit this morning, because what's a vacation without an ill-advised fashion purchase. I limited myself to a souvenir t-shirt and a simple top and one or two other random items. In one little boutique, I saw a t-shirt printed with the words "A little bit classy, a little bit hood." Why not just wear a shirt that says "Hi, my name is Lauren. I have three kids. Ask me about their travel sports and SAT scores." Snotty, I know. But I also know that if you wear a t-shirt proclaiming yourself as a little bit classy and a little bit hood, then you are neither. 

*****

Saturday, August 15. Saturday morning, and we're in the car, heading home. We wake up at 7 on the  last morning at the beach, which gives us just enough time to pack, clean up trash and recycling, have one last cup of coffee on the deck, take one last ride to the beach and then back to the bay, and vacate by 10. One final drive around the island and the week is over as quickly as it began. 

I think we crammed everything we could into this vacation. Ocean swimming every day, bike riding, ice cream eating, people watching, bay sunsets, souvenir shopping, book reading, walking, shell collecting, and just sitting around. The weather and the water were perfect, and the fear and dread lifted for a few days. Other than face masks (for people and Puppy) and hand sanitizer and social distance, I barely thought about the damn 'rona. It was a good week. 

We never did get a chance to eat at Borghi's, though. Maybe next year. There's always next year. 

Ear to the ground

Well, I don’t know what’s wrong with me because here it is, 2:30 in the afternoon on a day when we were supposed to be smack in the middle of a hurricane and instead it’s sunny and warm and dry, but I’m still filled with dread and fear. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Did I say that already? I think I did. 

I had planned to remain inside all day. I was going to work a full day if we didn’t have a power failure (but I was fully expecting a power failure), finish battening down the hatches; and then hunker down, maybe in an interior room, and wait for it all to blow over. But it blew over without waiting for me to finish waiting for it to blow over. That seems rather rude, doesn’t it? 

*****

Advice from the Maryland Department of Health: “Call your healthcare provider if stress reactions interfere with your daily activities for several days in a row.” And I think, define “several days,” because I’ve been alive for over 19,000 days, and stress reactions have interfered with my daily activities for at least half of them. Maybe I should call my healthcare provider. I’ll do that right now. 

*****

It’s Wednesday now. It was Tuesday when we were supposed to sustain a direct Isaias hit, and then nothing really happened; but in typical fashion, I found something to worry about. I’m still worried; still checking the overnight COVID numbers every day, looking for some indicator, however small and inconclusive, that things are beginning to look up. 

We dodged a weather bullet yesterday. No flooding, no trees down, and the lights didn’t even flicker, not for a moment. I even went swimming--by 4:30 PM, the rain had stopped altogether. I could smell the ozone as the sidewalk dried in the sun. It’s almost 4:30 again, and I think I just heard thunder, when it was supposed to remain sunny and dry all day today. The National Weather Service is trolling us. But it doesn’t matter, because I should stay out of the pool. Thanks to a newfound love for backstroke, my ears are clogged with water, and I don’t need an ear infection when I’m working overtime to avoid coronavirus. I can only monitor one disease trend at a time. 

Data driven

My job has taught me lots of things, including how to read dashboards and data visualizations. Generally, this knowledge is useful. Sometimes, though, a little knowledge is dangerous. 

Every morning, for example, I do what every sane person does on a beautiful summer morning, which is to check the overnight COVID numbers. What’s the positivity rate today? What’s the percentage change since yesterday? Up or down? How many new cases? How many hospitalized? How many have died? I have no idea how much money is in my checking account but I know how many people in Maryland have the ‘rona, and I know where the micro hotspots are by ZIP code. How is this knowledge useful for me, a person with no medical or public health background? I don’t know, but staying informed gives me an illusory sense of control. 

Although I can interpret a dashboard pretty well, I never could read weather radar. That, however, is not stopping me from tracking the radar for Tropical Storm Isaias, checking every five minutes to see how bad it’s going to be in Maryland when this very early named storm makes landfall. The predictions are all over the place, depending on where you look. 

As my project team likes to say, data can tell stories, and it can answer questions. Right now, it’s answering the age-old question: How much will things suck today? More today than yesterday? But not half as much as tomorrow? The plague is already here, and the storm is imminent. Will pestilence be far behind? I’m sure that there’s a Power BI dashboard somewhere that can answer that question. We have your live, interactive, real-time visualization, right here. 

Hand me a fork

It's Friday night and the FAFSA is making me want to walk right into the ocean. God help me. God help us all. 

*****

Let's talk about books instead. So after I finished Lina and Serge, I visited the opposite end of the political spectrum, with The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss. Actually, I have no idea what Auchincloss’s politics were (though I’m pretty sure that he was on the not a Communist sympathizer like so many writers of the early to mid 20th century). But he came from and wrote about the very rarified and inbred society of 19th and 20th century New York City aristocracy, as far from revolutionary Russia as you can get.

I liked the stories, and I’d read more of Auchincloss. Almost every one of his characters is a New York lawyer, as was Auchincloss himself; and most of the stories are set in the 20th century, though he also set a couple of them during the mid 19th century. Those stories were almost as believable and effective as the contemporary (to Auchincloss) stories because he had a thorough understanding of the inner life of people such as his characters, and of human nature in general. I don’t think that his focus on a narrow stratum of society limits the artistic merit of his work; I think that he just recognized that a writer can’t write about everyone and everything. That made him a good writer, not a bad one.

Segueing from plutocracy into anarchy, I read To the Barricades, the Alix Kates Shulman biography of Emma Goldman. It was OK. I’m not an admirer of Emma Goldman (nor of Ms. Shulman) but she saw through Soviet Communism far sooner than most early 20th century radicals. Aside from the hagiographic tone of the book and the frank admiration of Goldman’s total commitment to politics at the expense of everything else, I completely reject Shulman’s premise that anarchy has been misunderstood and poorly executed and that true anarchy is the means to a just society. Humans have an innate need for leadership, and many (maybe even most) people need a structured and organized society, with recognizable authority. And defending the weak against the strong would seem to be impossible under anarchy. Though I have to admit that if I lived as a poor person in early 20th century America (or even in early 21st century America), I’d be hard-pressed to see the value of the state, which does an absolutely shitty job of defending the weak or reining in the strong. But just because no government can ever be truly just (because we live in a fallen world), it doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t try.

After Emma, I started on Savage Beauty, the Nancy Mitford biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay. It's totally coincidental that I chose another biography of a famous woman written by a different famous woman. Of course, Emma Goldman was much more famous than her biographer, but Nancy Mitford was probably just as famous as Edna St. Vincent Millay. Anyway, I stopped after one page. I'm sure it's interesting, and I'll return to it eventually. But after Emma Goldman and Louis Auchincloss and the Prokofievs, I've had enough of the 20th century for now. We are hurtling toward a replay of the years 1929 through 1944, and I don't need to read the handbook.

*****

Speaking of handbooks. Hey FAFSA: What the fuck does this mean? 

How much did your Parent 1 (father/mother/stepparent) earn from working (wages, salaries, tips, etc.) in 2017? This amount is your Parent 1 (father's/mother's/stepparent's) portion of IRS Form 1040-lines 7+12+18 and Box 14 [Code A] of IRS Schedule K-1 (Form 1065).

Does that seem to you like a straightforward question? Well riddle me this: Why, first of all, do you need to see our two individual wage incomes when we filed jointly? And WHY do you ask for the EXACT SAME THING for Parent 2? Same lines: 7+12+18. There are only ONE OF EACH of lines 7+12+18 on the 1040, and WE ONLY FILED ONE. Again: Married, Filing Jointly. What. In the ACTUAL HELL. If I had a fork, I'd stick it in my fucking eye.

Son of a bitch. 

*****

So that's me, filling out forms. That's the real reason why I lie awake worrying about a return to Soviet-style totalitarianism. It's not because of the gulag or the interrogation cells. It's because I imagine that every task in life would be prefaced by a 47-page-long web form that demands administrative details from 11 years ago, secured by two-factor authentication, and designed to time out every time your session is inactive for over 7 minutes and I just can't.

*****
It's Sunday now. I just read this over, and it reads as a little crusty.

I'll adjust your gross income!

I think that a break from the early 20th century and a break from the FAFSA would seem to be in order. Additional book reviews and procedural notes to follow. Be afraid.

To the mattresses

Wednesday, you feel like Tuesday. And Google Docs: That little hide yesterday’s six pages of meeting notes as a two-days-late April Fool’s joke? Totally not funny. Just one more indicator of the pressing need to figure out G-Suite and Chrome OS, and PDQ. I’ll get to it.

The mouse has returned (a new mouse, of course); and the efforts to catch and kill it are ascending to new heights, or descending to new lows, depending on your perspective. Although the low-tech, non-violent approach was successful last time, the new mouse visitor appears to be notably brighter than his deceased predecessor and he (or likely she) has thus far thwarted every mouse-catching effort. My husband has tried a combination of sticky traps, traditional spring-release traps, and a variety of bait. The space underneath the kitchen sink is now nearly spotless, having been thoroughly cleaned, and it's also a virtual killing field for mice. However, we continue to see evidence that the mouse has been able to gnaw its way through the door-mounted garbage bag that hangs on the inside of the cabinet door and to then enjoy a late-night buffet.

So my husband bought an electronic mouse trap, which I promise is a real, manufactured item, available for sale at Home Depot and other retailers, for an obscene and ridiculous price. Well, it’s $40, but $40 for a mousetrap is absurdly expensive. Even as he bought the silly thing, he was almost sure that it wouldn’t work, but he was determined to at least try it. Meanwhile, he rigged the traps and the garbage bag in a way that appeared virtually mouse-proof, except to the mouse, who easily picked her way around the landmines.

So now we have a night-vision deer camera. Do you think I’m kidding? I’m not. Here it is.

It's the fatigue-green plastic thing on the left. Note that there are
no fewer than four mousetraps here, and those are only the ones visible. 

I didn’t even ask how much this cost, because I would rather not know, and because it wouldn't matter to my husband, who would pretty much pay any price to figure out how this stupid mouse was managing to evade his carefully constructed obstacle course of death. Last week while shopping for my son’s baseball pants, he wandered over to the hunting section at Dick’s and there it was: An infrared light deer camera, or whatever the hell technology allows you to take video of wildlife under cover of near total darkness. He was sold.

He caught some footage of the thing last night, but we could only see part of its body (not sure which is worse--the head or the tail--we could see its icky little beady-eyed face but not its revolting tail) so we know that the mouse was at large last night, but we’re still not sure how it got through the cabinet and avoided the traps. The camera has been re positioned in the hope that we’ll get footage that shows the whole sequence: Entry into the cabinet from whatever tiny hole or crevice remains open after the extensive hole-plugging efforts, dodge and weave through the minefield, mouse middle finger at the camera, trash feast, exit stage left.

Or maybe we’ll just house train the vile creature and learn to live with it. If it didn’t leave droppings behind, then I could maybe, possibly coexist with it. As long as I didn’t have to see it. Or hear it. Or maintain any conscious awareness of its existence under my roof.

Never mind: It has to get out of my house, or die. We’re going to the mattresses.

Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it

And just like that, it's all over, and it's all starting again. A week ago, it was still summer. Now I'm up to my neck in fantasy football (no, not me, because ain't nobody got time for that) and back-to-school nights, and fall sports, and weekend fire pits, and it's not so bad. Not summer, but it's OK.

*****
Saturday: Today is my birthday. And it's a beautiful day, but it's definitely a fall day. For lots of people, that's the ideal weather. "Crisp." I spend most of early October restraining the urge to punch people who go around rhapsodizing about the crispness of the weather, and the beauty of the changing leaves, and the pumpkin fucking spice. Yes, it's nice out and the leaves are beautiful (pumpkin, however, is fit for nothing but pie; and pumpkin spice latte is revolting) but fall is just a prelude to winter. And winter is dark and cold and interminably long.

But enough of that. Lots of people in Texas and the Caribbean and Florida would slap me for complaining about cold weather that's coming three months from now, and they'd be right.

*****

We went to the Smithsonian American Art Museum today, which I had never been to, and which I never realized was in the same building with the National Portrait Gallery. I love American art, and art museums in general, and 20th century history, so the place is a veritable gold mine.

The building itself is astonishingly beautiful, too. I wouldn't want to live in the 19th century, but they knew how to build public spaces then. If a building of similar beauty and durability were to be built today, it'd be a Silicon Valley corporate headquarters, or a country club where a PGA tour event would be held every year.

I didn't even know about the American Visionary: JFK's Life and Times exhibit (which ends next week) until we arrived. I'm still reading The Crisis Years, so this was good timing.

Kennedy and Khrushchev met for the first time in 1961. The meeting didn't
go very well, but Jackie seemed to have had a good time.

The National Portrait Gallery has a rotating exhibit of photographs and paintings and sculptures of 20th-century Americans, divided into eras (1900-1920, etc.) 

Gertrude Stein and my younger son. It looks like they're gossiping about Ernest
Hemingway and Ezra Pound. Pound would probably have voted for Trump.

It's Sunday now. I have work to do, though I'm not sure how much I'll actually accomplish, given that half of the neighborhood (the male half) is in my backyard.

Of the many things that send me into a tailspin of panic and anxiety, my least favorites are administrative and bureaucratic processes and proceedings, especially new ones that replace ones that I finally managed to master. For years, the Montgomery County Public Schools used an online grade tracking tool called Edline. After a few years, I had finally reached a  point at which keeping on top of my sons' progress in school was an easy and routine task. And now Edline is gone, replaced by what appears to be a homegrown system, that I'll have to learn all over again. Edline allowed one log-in and password per parent, but the new system issues a new password and log-in for each child, meaning I'll have two accounts, not just one. Why?

And now that I've become almost totally dependent on Google Drive and Google Photos, they're going away, too, to be replaced by something whose name I could easily look up (on Google), but I won't. And my son is a junior, which means that I have to learn how to get a kid into college. Apparently, the process has changed since the 1980s. The Internet and all.

Oh my gosh, I'm the worst. It's a beautiful day, and I don't have a single real problem in the world, and I don't even mind spending the afternoon copy editing. At least I don't have to pay attention to the football game. I mean, I want the Redskins to win and everything, but you'll never convince me that one football game isn't exactly like every other football game, ever. I've seen one; ergo, I've seen them all. I hope that Florida is spared. Meanwhile, HTTR, I guess.

A plague on your house

Monday: Once I start reading a book, I usually make myself finish reading it.  Well, that used to be true. I'm now abandoning a book less than halfway through, for the third time this year. I was reading Shana Alexander's Happy Days, and had every intention of finishing it, until I found myself pages and pages into an exhaustive exegesis of the history of Tin Pan Alley, from George M. Cohan to Irving Berlin to the Gershwins, complete with song lyrics, contract terms, and a side foray into the founding of ASCAP. (Well, that part was interesting.) I mean, am I writing a thesis? Why do I need to know the price of sheet music in 1924?

And so now, apparently, I'm a bibliographic Shark Tank. Authors have no more than 100 pages (maybe 50, if you're trying my patience with royalty schemes for hundred-year-old popular songs) to convince me to keep reading until the end. I've never actually seen the show, so I don't know what the hosts actually say to candidates who don't make the cut, but whatever it is, consider it said to Shana Alexander.

So with Shana Alexander fired or banished or whatever the Shark Tank equivalent is, I just started reading The Zelmenyaners, which according to Rokhl Kafrissen's Jewish Book Council review, is "the funniest Yiddish novel about Soviet central planning you'll read this year." 

I know, right? I read novels about Soviet central planning all the time, and they're not usually that funny. 

I think I'm still missing the Cazalets, so I guess I needed another saga about a family with an unusual last name that includes a Z. The Cazalets and the Zelmenyaners both live in turbulent times, but of course I'd rather be in London during the Blitz than Minsk (or anywhere else in the Soviet Union) in the late 1920s and early 1930s. I'm only a few pages in, but I'm going to guess that the humor is of the gallows variety.  I'll report back later. 

*****
Tuesday: It used to be, in the good old days, that baseball games were cancelled in the event of rain. That is, except during seasons when there are more rainouts than games, and the league is desperate to cram in as many games as possible before the season ends and the playoffs begin. And that's why I just spent two hours standing in the cold rain, cheering on a bunch of dispirited, mud-stained, bedraggled 12-year-old boys who weren't any happier to be there than I was. And it's going to rain again tomorrow. Maryland three days before Memorial Day weekend, and it's like monsoon season in the Ganges Delta. What in the actual hell, as they say in high school. 

*****
Wednesday: Today, I looked up the word "website," because I needed to reassure myself that the one-word spelling still prevails in most accepted style guides. I was right, and it does. Then, I had to look up the title of a journal article on drug policy, because I suspected that it had been listed incorrectly in a resume that I was readying for a proposal. I was right about that, too--a word was missing.  But that, as they say, is not the weird part. The weird part came when I clicked on Google search again, and was offered "websites to buy drugs" as a search option, before I even started to type. This was at work, naturally, so our IT department probably thinks that I'm trying to score illegal painkillers on the Internet.

"Hitman,"  for your information, is one word. So no need to Google it. Because you don't want Google to go and helpfully search "How to recruit an assassin," or "Murder for hire, cheap" the next time you want to look up movie times.

I mean, really

*****
Thursday: This weather is cordially invited to suck it.

*****
Friday: I have so much to do this weekend that I can't keep it all straight in my brain, which isn't too sharp under the best of circumstances. Exhibit A, for example: I have too much to do, and yet here I am, blogging about nothing. Is that what a smart person does? Maybe not. Maybe not. 

But it's still Memorial Day Weekend, which means that it's summer, which means that all is well. I have no problems that summer can't solve.

*****
Saturday: I inadvertently published this mess last night, and a bunch of people appear to have read it. So I apologize. I feel like a chef who just fed his customers a plate full of undercooked chicken.

*****

When I was 9 or 10, I saw a movie--I can't remember its title, nor most of its plot, but I do remember that it was about a pioneer family who endured epic, cinematic hardships as they sought to establish a homestead in the wilds of the 19th century American west. Although I don't remember much about this movie, one particularly horrifying scene is burned into my consciousness, probably forever at this point. The heroine, dressed in what a 1970s movie producer thought that a pioneer woman would have worn (gingham, pinafore, bonnet, lace-up boots), heard a strange buzzing, humming sound, which grew louder and louder until, overcome with curiosity, she stepped outside the log cabin onto the barren sun-baked dusty prairie, where (OMG, it's too much to think about) she was suddenly swarmed by cicadas, which swirled around her, landing on her by the hundreds, as she clung to her bonnet, shrieking.

I'm going to go have a drink.

OK, I'm fine now. I didn't really have a drink, because it's 8 in the morning, but I can't overemphasize the effect that this scene had on my growing and impressionable 10-year-old mind. So my windows are open now, despite the light rain (and the rain! How is it possible that there's any rain even left?) and the cicadas are louder than Metallica, and what with 40 days and 40 nights of near-nonstop rain and an actual, legitimate plague of fucking locusts, I feel like I live in the Old Testament.

But it's still OK. Because it's SUMMER!

*****

Annual countdown to opening day: T minus 1. 

Actual Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend conversations.

12YO: OK. I think I'm ready. I have my hat, my towel, my suit, extra shirt, goggles, and wallet.
Me: Put that towel back in the bathroom, and get a beach towel.
12YO: OK. I just like this one because I can roll it up really really small. By the way, I have $28 in my wallet. Is that enough for the snack bar, do you think?
Me: ---

15YO: I have to work at 3. Is it going to be sunny? Do I need my sunglasses?
Me: I don't know, but just bring them anyway. It can't hurt to have them.
15YO: OK. Do you have a whistle? I can't find my whistle.
(I actually have two whistles, for swim meet refereeing purposes.)
Me: Yes. Here you go.
15YO: What size is the cork in this?
Me: What? I have no idea.
15YO: See, the ones that have the bigger corks have a better sound, and you don't have to blow as hard. I'm going to go outside and test this.
Me: ---

Apparently, the whistle passed the test. I'm not sure, meanwhile, how a person is supposed to determine the size of the cork in a whistle. I'm not going to find out, either.

*****

Sunday: I suppose I wouldn't normally mind spending a large chunk of the weekend fighting with a giant, unwieldy Word document with multiple authors. Except when the Word document appears to be very close to winning.

Meanwhile, this mess is about as cooked as it's going to be and no one should be in any immediate danger of salmonella, so now I'm going to hit publish for real.  Happy Memorial Day, and bon appetit.