House Arrest

Check In

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Tue, 26 Aug 08 09:52:00 UT

Hello, my few dedicated readers. We have arrived at our new home and settled in. School starts tomorrow and I will soon have time again for blogging. The lurid details are waiting, but I intend to make several edits to the blog, including a stronger effort to protect my identity. Stay tuned.

In the meanwhile, allow me to relate a dream I had the other day. This is pretty much the dream as I remember it, without additions, and if anyone can tell me what it means, I'd be grateful.

I was sitting in the front passenger seat of a midsize American car and Barak Obama was behind the wheel. He was not a terribly good driver, easily distracted as he searched the front seat and dashboard for something - a piece of gum, a cell phone - while the car drifted into other lanes. Horns blared, tires squealed, but it didn't seem to affect him. When he found what he was looking for, he began to pay attention again, staying in his lane and driving at the speed limit. Then out of the blue, he asked me, "What is Anger?"

It was a test, and I felt my character being probed. Fortunately, in my dream at least, this was a subject I had dwelt on philosophically for some time, and with only a pause to line up the words in my head, I answered, "Anger is not getting what you want."

He turned to me, surprise on his face. Perhaps he did not know this answer and I had enlightened him. More likely, he had known it, but did not suspect such depth of understanding from a less than stellar pupil like myself. In either case, the car began to drift into the oncoming traffic lane of the highway as he slapped the wheel with his hand, emphatically repeating, "Yes! Yes! That's right!"

He began to speak to me in an animated fashion as he knocked traffic cones flying. With just one distracted part of his mind he threaded the car through a construction zone, elaborating on Anger and the state of America, words that I missed completely as I gripped my seat tightly. Somehow he managed to cause no damage or accidents, as if this convoluted and dangerous meandering were as familiar to him as a commute home.

When he paused to take a breath, I interrupt him as politely as I could. "You know," I began, "we have got to get you elected President. I can't think of anyone who is in more need of a chauffeur than you."

That's when I woke up.

Anatomy

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Sun, 22 Jun 08 22:10:00 UT

Joseph was lying on the floor on his side, his head on his left arm, playing with two toy cars and singing one of my fiddle tunes. All I could make out was the meter of the tune. He had long since lost the melody, and his monotone, nasal la-la-la-ing altered only in dynamics - louder when the tune pitched up, quieter when it pitched down. He had the rhythm of it, a somewhat unique meter, but I only recognized it because I had just played it a half hour before. Normally, his singing is quite expressive for a three year old, but at that time it was not unlike the droning noise he makes when he is up past his bedtime.

And tired he was and had been for a couple of hours, the result of a late night and a full day, too tired to safely climb onto a couch, much less any climbing apparatus. Two hours earlier, he had mounted a vertical, three rung ladder at a playground - a feat he is more than capable of when well-rested - and then his feet slipped off and he plunged to the ground, his chin whistling past the metal ladder rails, narrowly avoiding an unexpected and unbudgeted trip to the emergency room by a centimeter. He lay on the ground without moving, waiting for the adrenaline haze to clear. By the time I had raced to him, he realized nothing was hurt at all and wrestled himself out of my arms and was running off again. Nevertheless, I revoked his pilot license and grounded him off the monkey bars for the rest of the afternoon.

Now the long day and previous late night were catching up with him.

"Joseph, let's go brush your teeth and get you in the bath."

Like a light switch, he was vertical, on his feet, jumping excitedly. "Yes! Yes! I want to bring my train. Can I have Thomas in the bath?"

"Yes, Joe, Thomas is a bath toy."

"Oh good! I want to play with her. Papa, will you brush my teeth in the tub?"

"No problem. Go pee on the toilet first."

"But I just peed AND pooped."

"That was an hour ago, and every time you get in this warm tub without using the toilet first, you always pee, at least a little bit. And I just don't think washing you with pee would be very smart."

"Good idea, Papa!"

He did his business on the toilet and got in the tub. I handed him the rubber-ducky Thomas the Train, a two-inch-long, flexible, plastic, hollow Thomas with a hole in its smokestack. He immediately dunked it underwater and started to drive it around. I gently held Joseph's head while I brushed his teeth and while Thomas idled, half-submerged, about his knees. When we were done, Joseph slid over on his belly and began to push Thomas slowly across the surface of the water.

"Look, Papa! She can drive underwater!"

"Very cool. Hey, Joe, I forgot. Why is this Thomas a girl?"

"Because my other Thomas is a boy."

"Oh, right. I remember now." The other Thomas being the wooden one in his track set, one of the few painted pieces that wasn't replaced in the recent lead paint recall. I watched him play, trying to fill Thomas and squirt the water out. "Can I try to fill him up for you? I mean, her?"

"Sure, Papa."

I submerged Thomas underwater and squeezed. A stream of noisy bubbles jetted from the smokestack and Joseph giggled.

"That's funny, Papa. Do it again!"

I did it again. Several times in fact, because in order to get all the air out of Thomas, I had to tip him ... I mean, her ... upside-down underwater and move the air trapped in his ... I mean, her ... tender over to the smoke stack. But as I squeezed the air out, some of the trapped air floated back into the tender. Several attempts and much giggling later, Thomas was now saturated, water-logged, and no longer floating. I picked him ... I mean, her ... up and flipped ... her upside down, and squeezed. A long satisfying jet of water came out, spraying the sides of the tub, the spigot, and Joseph himself.

"Stop, Papa!" he shrieked, laughing. "Let me do it!"

I handed him Thomas and he squirted water into the tub, very pleased and excited. Much experimentation with fluid dynamics, the mathematics of parabolas, and parental patience, but his high spirits were kept in check by his general fatigue. Finally he squirted Thomas upside-down, and a light of recognition appeared in his eyes.

"Papa! Look. Her smokestack is a penis and she's peeing out of her penis!"

*****

The other day, while having an afternoon snack, I overheard Hannah in the dining room ask Nola where babies come from.

I heard the drawn-out "Weeellll..." and in the pause that followed, I thought, "Good question. I wonder what the answer will be."

I had no thought of coming to Nola's rescue, and for the sake of my reputation, I must offer some justification, however weak. First of all, I was working in my office and under deadline. Secondly Hannah is a girl and Nola is a girl, and though the timing was roughly six years too early, it would have been Nola's job anyway. And finally, Nola is a physical therapist, trained in a medical school, with a graduate background in biology as well. Whereas I would have turned beet red and hemmed and hawed, and given any number of generally correct but slightly inaccurate answers, and would have avoided the main point at all costs, Nola, I was certain, would give an answer so medically complete, so biologically accurate, and so scientifically technical that Hannah would want to change the subject as quickly as possible. Clearly Nola was the man for the job.

And a fantastic job she did, explaining human anatomical development with the concise and accurate oration of a consulting family physician with whom you have already used up twenty of his allotted, HMO-dictated fifteen minutes.

But my prediction was wrong. Hannah listened with the infernal attention span of a Montessori alumna, and then followed up with the question she had been saving. "OK. But what I want to know is, how does the sperm get in there?"

I wish I could remember how Nola answered this question. The blood was pounding so hard in my ears, I'm not sure I heard it clearly anyway, but it was factually correct and appropriately dissimulating at the same time - a true masterpiece of parental tact and medical fact that somehow still preserved our daughter's innocent understanding of the world.

Five minutes later, Hannah was done eating and back to playing fairy games with her Polly Pockets. Nola came into my room, her forehead glistening, her face flush, her mouth dry and panting. I praised her performance, assured her that, with no preparation, she had done extraordinarily well, magnificent in fact, and I said (truthfully) that I had no criticism to offer whatsoever. Not that I would have been so stupid as to offer criticism at that particular juncture.

*****

"Say that again, Joseph?"

"Her smokestack is a penis and she's peeing out of her penis!"

"Uh, Joe..." OK, Matthew, whoa. Think about what you are going to say, before you say it. "Actually, Joe, boys have penises and girls have vaginas. So if your Thomas is a girl, she probably doesn't have a penis."

"Oh, OK." This seemed to puzzle him, but only for a moment. "OK, this is her anus. She's peeing out of her anus!"

This was getting complicated. Strategy was called for. Using that tone reserved by parents for when their children assert the ridiculous and you want to show that you are "in" with the joke (whether or not the child is "in" yet), I said "Joe, do you pee out of your anus?"

"Nooo!" he said, laughing at his own silliness.

"Nooo. You poop out of your anus, right?"

"Right, but ... but ... but, she's peeing AND pooping out of her anus."

"Um ... ok, but..."

"No, no, no, wait. The smokestack ... is her scrotum..."

"Uh..."

"and she's peeing and pooping into her scrotum!"

He looked so sure of himself, as if I couldn't possibly contradict him, and I couldn't. For a moment I thought of Nola, next door, reading a bedtime book to Hannah, but even if she were available, I could not possibly have asked her for assistance and still looked at my reflection in the morning.

"Uh, ok, Joe. Just ... uh ... just keep it inside the tub, ok?"

"OK, Papa."

Still Alive

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Mon, 5 May 08 20:18:00 UT

Today I received two letters in the mail.

The first was from the United States Government, mailed in a low budget undersized envelope, informing me that my stimulus check for $1800 will deposited in my bank account no later than May 5, 2008.

The second was a bill from the hospital for $1768.38.

I suppose one could say that my ire has been stimulated.

Kauai

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Wed, 30 Apr 08 22:22:00 UT

"OK, children. This is our last time on the escalators. We go up. We go down. And then we head back to the gate and wait with Mama."

"OK, Papa," agreed Hannah.

"OK, Papa," echoed Joseph.

We rose up out of the crowd of passengers in the Honolulu airport, mostly white mainlainders off of Flight #1 from Chicago, waiting for their vacation paradise to begin. They milled about in close quarters, stepping carefully around the wheeled handbags and carry-on purses, overstuffed and resembling panicked blowfish. As my children and I rose through the opening in the ceiling, the sunhats of the other passengers disappeared and we found ourselves on an upper level, surrounded by windows with a view across the tarmac to the metropolis beyond, and somewhere after that, the sapphire blue Pacific Ocean. There was not a soul on floor two except us and we weren't staying long.

"Aloha!" commanded a disembodied voice over our heads. "Due to heightened airport security..."

"Come on Joseph!" Hannah yelled and traced a semi-circle back onto the down escalator with Joseph right on her tail. I grabbed their hands as we entered the mass of humanity. Repeat ad nauseum.

Twenty minutes later, and twenty hours after we had rose from our predawn beds in Vermont, we handed the boarding passes to the agent for the last leg of our flight. Honolulu to Kauai. Crossing the threshold onto the plane, I was baptized in a cloud of condensing vapor falling from an overhead vent. Hannah and I walked to the very back of the jet to our rigid seats that did not recline. She promptly fell asleep across my lap.

On a previous leg of our journey, the children were still "perky at thirteen o'clock," but patient, excited, well-behaved, even as we waited for the Chicago bound passengers to deplane.

"We're going to Hanayuyu!" Joseph told a soft-toned, bespectacled man in a business suit.

The man looked down at my three-year old and all the muscles in his middle-aged face resolved into an enormous grin. His second chin jutted out as he peered down at Joseph with an astonished, wide-open mouth.

"Hanayuyu?" he said, his voice full of glee. "How wonderful!"

Joseph smiled back, feeling instant pity and comradeship. "Would you like to go to Hanayuyu?"

"I would love to go to Hanayuyu!" he answered, he eyes squinting shut in imagined ecstasy as he drew out the verb.

"OK. Let's go!" said Joseph. Practical boy, to the point. No more monkey business. Let's get this show on the road.

"Matthew?"

I snapped my eyes open. I was sitting upright against the back wall of the cabin, but my chin was digging a hole in my sternum through a wet patch of cotton T-shirt smelling of my own saliva. The back of my neck felt stretched and distended on the right side. Nola was smiling down at me. "We're here, hun. Can you wake up Hannah?"

It turned out that I could not. She had been napping a bit on the flight from Chicago, but still had a strong sleep deficit to make up. I carried her across the Kauai airport for a good quarter mile before the jossling woke her.

*****

The buildings in Hawaii are topologically inside out, like a drawing by M.C. Escher. You could drive your gleaming, newly-washed, rental SUV into the tiled lobby of your resort without shattering wall or window and park it among the carpeting and paintings and statues. The door men, liveried in flowered shirts and knee-length shorts waiting with luggage trolleys behind their podiums, would scarcely glance in your direction. Within the lobby, glass doors lead to exotic spas, and there are corridors passing down rows and rows of hotel room doors, where small wren will land at your door and pick up a crumb of muffin off your discarded room service tray before flying away down the hall. If you walk further down the hall, the roof vanishes and a two hundred year old baobab tree is growing through a hole in the floor up through an atrium with no ceiling, and a little farther on, there is a waterfall with a swan swimming about.

*****

The first two days, Nola took the children to markets, parks, and beaches, and when they wanted a break, they came back to the hotel and went down to the pool. It was shaped something like a lagoon with a beach made of large grain sand (or small grain pebbles), a water slide, a waterfall, and a couple of snaking canals hidden by landscaped islands and a coi pond. There were three sand-bottomed hot tubs, one set aside for children, which turned out to be useful when the clouds came through. We had the occasionally shower or storm, but the sun always came through eventually. The children were happy and easy to please and there was hardly any whining. Even for a child, it is hard to complain in Hawaii, and they tried to hold up their end with only minimal success.

I spent those days in meetings with my fellow employees, and I must say that they were meetings that definitely "didn't suck." We held them at restaurants in posh hotels, on a boulder strewn slope approachable only after wading a creek, under trees on sand covered cliff tops. Last year had been moderately successful, so this company retreat was sponsored by the company. You can do that sort of thing when you are the sole owner of a six-person company who happens to like tropical beaches, and that is what my boss is, God bless him.

One night, the teenage daughters of one employee offered to babysit the younger children of other employees so the adults could go out for dinner in a fancy restaurant. We brought Hannah and Joseph to their room, only to find that a surprise birthday party had been arranged for Hannah (it being her 6th birthday). There was cake and ice cream and balloons and cards, and we were able to slip out without a hint of separation anxiety. That was a fine evening.

*****

Quick geography lesson. Imagine smoke rings blowing from a tobacco pipe growing large and larger until they escape the bowl and float through the air where in time they slowly dissolve and vanish. Picture it from overhead, fill in the smoke rings, and you have a fairly good map of the islands of Hawaii. A vent deep in the earth pushed magma up until the growing volcano broke the surface of the ocean and became an island. Every so many years (whether hundreds, thousands, or millions, I don't recall), the vent stopped to take a breath and the newly minted island was carried off northwestward by the floating continental plate. Over time, the rain and wind wore this island down, while a new island was created back in its original place by the same process. Eventually the first island eroded back into the ocean, leaving no visible trace. This is why there is a chain of Hawaiian islands, and why the ones farthest east are younger, larger, taller and craggier, while the islands to the west are generally older, flatter, decrepit, and covered with moss and foliage.

Kauai is the penultimate island to the west. Only Niihau is older, and erosion has left it more of an oversized sandbar than a proper volcanic island. There are older islands even farther west, but as they have eroded below the surface of the water, one can hardly call them islands anymore. Though old and worn, Kauai does not have these identity crises. Mt. Waialeale, at 5148 feet, is the visible and significant remains of the volcano that formed Kauai, and though it is extinct, in fact crumbling to pieces with a long tongue of canyon on the south west side like a breach in a siege, the mountain has the honor of boasting the rainiest spot on earth with over 460 inches of rain a year. The wind driving in from the west, having become saturated over thousands of miles of ocean, rushes up the canyon and up the inside wall of the former crater. The rise in altitude creates a drop in temperature and the water condenses and precipitates. The rain falls, further eroding the crater, and rushes back down the canyon where it came from. By the time the air has climbs the peak and flipped over the crater wall, all the moisture has been wrung out like a sponge, leaving an arid desert on the other side; one of the driest spots on earth right next to very wettest.

*****

No one rushes on Kauai. In fact, our guidebook warned us about several restaurants whose excellence in cuisine was surpassed only by the indifference of the service. But after all, it is an island. No matter how fast you move, you're still here.

A single road winds around the outer edge of Kauai, connecting the series of coastal communities and towns, and it was the only road between our resort and the southern half of the island. During rush hour, the traffic on the two lane road would back up for miles behind the traffic light at the airport turnoff. There was no room, and even less inclination, to pass. So we sat, ducks in a row, waiting our turn to creep ahead ten feet, various radios competing over the hum of the coolant fans. One such pause gave us a leisurely view of the Kauai Penitentiary. Very closely. Even my sissy, geek arm could have thrown a stone from the car and broken a window in the warden's office. But that would not have been necessary. I could have jumped the six foot gully, climbed the chain link fence, and opened his door myself. There was no barbed wire, no patrolling German shepherds, no observation towers or machine gun embankments pointing inwards. The few guards scattered about observed the prisoners with all the rapt attention of a underpaid middle school teacher on playground monitor duty. In fact, the resemblance of the facility to a blue collar neighborhood public school was uncanny. All it lacked was the broken playground set and graffiti.

A clique of prisoners smoking cigarettes in the shade of an awning watched us pass at a snail's pace. I turned off the radio, rolled down the window, and asked them what they were discussing. They informed me that they were just planning their break out. It had been a work in progress for several months, but for sure it would happen "bumbye, mebbe next week." But when I inquired, they could not satisfy me with an exact date. It wasn't that they didn't trust me with the information, but rather the plan had not fully coalesced. They had to work out details of precedence. Apparently certain prisoners felt it beneath their dignity to lace their fingers together and provide a boost over the fence for certain other prisoners. They agreed seniority should determine precedence, but they could not agree on what determined seniority. Some felt it should be based on how much time one had already served, though subfactions argued over whether one could count prior convictions. Others thought the length of the sentence mattered more than how much of it had been served. While those of a finer discrimination felt that the gravity of the crime should trump. Poaching pineapples from the governors private plantation might, through corruption of the justice system, result in a longer sentence but it hardly deserved precedence over honest manslaughter of one's peers. That was the gist of the argument, and though it was hard at times to follow the local pidgin, they left long pauses between speakers in which I could puzzle out the meaning. When they reached a particularly sticky point, and the discussion threatened to raise the temperature of the already languid afternoon, a guard would come along and brokered peace, defusing the conversation with the polite dexterity of protocol officers arranging the procession to banquet hall.

I thought this madness, and told them so. Surely, I interrupted them, the fence and ditch presented no meaningful obstacle. At the time, only one guard was left in view, and he, gazing at his image reflected in the window and picking his teeth with a splinter of coconut husk, seemed suitably distracted, and, in any event, easily bribed. Why couldn't they leave now?

"Aznuts", they assured me. "We gotta stay brudders, else there'd be choke beef, and eriding go junk." There was generally nodding of heads and some gave me the stink eye as to say that a law-abiding haole boy shouldn't pretend to know mo bettah than they how things were down in Hawaii. And in the pause that followed, one sallow and philosophical member of the troupe who had been silent up until now, observed to no one in particular, "Nuff already. Where would we go, anyhow? It's an f-in' island."

Dentist

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Fri, 4 Apr 08 21:36:00 UT

Rough week at work. The kind of week that makes you wonder if you are in the right business. A persistent error message in a key bit of software I had written was proving very difficult to debug. How difficult?

Do you remember the game of Telephone? A group of people line up, and one whispers a complex sentence to another person, and then they whisper it by memory to the next, and so on. Then you compare the result at the end to the original message, and the joke is how different the result ends up from the original. It was something like that. I had a chain of programs talking to each other and after ten minutes of processing, the last one returned an error message that was completely meaningless and garbled by the time it got to me. Something like, "I on burp actual Have on blind expurgate turn on tusk heath."

It wasn't really that exact sentence. That sentence came from the latest Viagra spam mail in my InBox.

My boss called to express his concern about the mounting work load that was log-jammed behind getting this priority bug fixed. He reassured me that he believes in my smarts and talents and abilities, and could I possibly stop being a super-Dad and get a bit more support from my family in order to get enough sleep, get rid of my cold, and apply my best energies to the problem?

No dummy, my boss.

To be fair, Nola has already been getting up five times a night when Joseph (from whom I got the cold) and Hannah (who just got it from me) come in with fevers, nightmares, or just cheerful, perky, 5:00 AM warbling. I suppose I could ask Nola to do more, but, you know, it's that time of the month, and discretion is the better part of valor. No, the ugly truth is, I am simply not performing up to snuff. If I may paraphrase a popular bumper sticker, Lord help me to be the programmer my boss thinks I am.

So, I closed the door to my "office" and spent four hours assiduously working my way back up the telephone chain. Meanwhile, Nola was in the kitchen trying to keep the house clean, prepare food, and entertain two children home from school with colds. Not easy, since Joseph has entered a delightful new phase where he has to touch every object he sees, whether or not it is sharp, hot, fragile, or his.

It was 2:00 in the afternoon, and I had just traced the Telephone message back to, "It was very kind of God to let Mr. Jones marry Mrs. Jones and thus make two people in the world miserable instead of four," when a cheerful pop-up reminder flashed across my laptop screen.

"Dentist appointment: 0 minutes."

"Augh! Nola!" I yelled from my work desk, "What time are our dentist appointments?"

"Ohhhh ....", Nola spluttered, a desperate ejaculation on the tip of her tongue. She had forgotten, too. The temptation to swear was strong, but the children were right there, listening. Several helpful words, all of them inappropriate, vied for the honor of finishing her thought. Had Hannah been paying attention, she could have easily read them out loud as they flitted about Nola's head, taking turns passing in and out of her reddening ears. Nola held her tongue as long as she could, but she was never good with temptation. "The only way to get rid of temptation," said Oscar Wilde, "is to yield to it."

"Ohhh... bother!" she finally released.

Thank you, A.A. Milne.

I called the dentist's office - "I'm on my way!" - and then dashed out the door. When I pulled up, my hygienist was chatting amiably with the staff by the front desk. She welcomed me directly into the chair. I lay back exhausted.

"Don't forget the gloves and mask," I reminded her. "I'm still getting over a cold."

Usually when they go after the tartar on my teeth, there is a fair bit of scraping and tugging followed by copious bleeding from my receding gums and a deep, cold sensation in the roots of my teeth about as pleasant as claws on a chalkboard. But somehow, that did not happen this time. Perhaps I was too tired to notice. I closed my eyes, and did not open them until I heard an amused voice repeating, "Could you open a little wider? Excuse me. Hello! Could you open a little wider?"

"Huh?" I snorted, waking up. "Oh. Sowwy."

The dentist came in later to examine my x-rays and teeth. Somehow we were all a bit punchy by that point, and we got on the subject of surgically opening and cleaning wounds, a task that my dentist derives particular satisfaction from. This is a perverse trait she shares with my wife. Medical people - honestly! Then she told me that the little piece of tissue that had grown over a flossing wound six months ago had shrunk, but not completely gone away, and she felt it ought to be removed.

"You are a picker!" I accused.

"In the worst way," she confessed. "I can't help it. Give me a good abscess to drain. I'll do it for free." She offered to do it for free? Seriously? How could I say no? We made a date. Something to look forward to. Don't tell my wife.

I raced home so Nola could press Pause on the domestic tasks, grab the car, and head back with Hannah for their appointments.

Later that night, I sat down after the children were in bed and chipped away at my Telephone problem until I uncovered the original message. "Who put the bomp in the bomp-she-bomp-she-bomp?" At last! Success!

It was 2:00 in the morning, and I called it a night.

Criteria

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Wed, 2 Apr 08 22:16:00 UT

We are suffering from "prelocation" anxiety. We want to move. We need to move. The big, mouth-watering carrot of a quality Montessori elementary school for our children dangles in our dreams, while the punishing stick (with a rusty nail through the end) of outrageous health insurance costs and soaring property taxes pillages our bank accounts. After hours on the phone with friends and families, long evenings researching on the internet, and a few reconnaissance trips, we are down to two options: mid-coast Maine and Blacksburg, Virginia. Neither of them are perfect, and should we move to either one, we may find ourselves packing up again four years down the road, but both offer something we found nowhere else - quality, affordable, Montessori elementary schools.

Montessori did not start out as a priority for us, but after observing good public schools that did not match up to mediocre Montessori schools, it has become almost a requirement. If you were to ask me why Montessori education is so great, I might be at a loss to explain what I see. Clearly, our children could go to public school and get as fine an education as we did. No doubt, someday they will cross over to public school, since you can count the number of Montessori high schools in this country on one hand. But the differences in methods, goals, and results are observable, and it is hard to not want to give your child the best. A common complaint of Montessori children who cross over to public school is, "in public school, you don't get to work on what you want. You have to work on what they tell you to work on, and just when something actually gets interesting, they make you put it away and start something else." But the best description came from the daughter of a Montessori teacher who later grew up to be a Montessori teacher herself. When she switch to public high school, she told her Mom, "The difference between Montessori and public school is that in public school, there is only one right answer."

Unfortunately, there are not a whole lot of Montessori elementary schools in this country, and even fewer that offer a quality education within our financial means. We've found two so far, in communities that offer possibilities and challenges for us. We would keep looking for the elusive, perfect town, but we are out of time. Most schools close their re-enrollment period at the end of March and they open their few remaining slots to the general public in April. The good schools fill up quickly, and they want to meet a child before they accept him or her. If we want Hannah to stay in Montessori next year, it will have to be one of these two places.

Our first option is the Damariscotta Montessori School in mid-coast Maine. The school is top notch, with a talented set of teachers and administers, and a parent community that loves their school. Their turn of the century farm house and barn sit on several acres with apple and weeping birch trees. The administrator is bright, practical, energetic, and smart. The classrooms were full of happy, active, busy children enjoying their work. The whole time we were there, I did not see one child speak disrespectfully to an adult or peer. They were too busy having fun and learning.

Our second option is Tall Oaks Montessori School in Blacksburg, Virginia. We didn't spend as much time at this school, but we liked everything we saw. Like much of Blacksburg itself, the buildings were plain and prefab, but the classrooms were hives of focused activity, the teachers were top notch, and the reputation was solid.

Either school would be more than adequate and both are affordable. I wish I could say the same for the communities they inhabit.

Mid-coast Maine is paradise, right on the ocean, unspoiled, full of small towns with character and history, full of good people, the salt of the earth as one parent told us. But financially it is not much better than Vermont. Housing is somewhat cheaper than Vermont, taxes are lower, but health insurance is only marginally better, and everything else costs more: food, gas, clothing. To make it work, Nola might have to go back to work part time, something we had hoped to put off until Joseph was older. Another option is to buy a home in Alna - a rural township so sparsely populated they have no schools of their own. Instead, they will pay to send a child to the school of your choice, and the Montessori school is an allowable option. Alna has the additional perq of bordering the cleanest river in Maine - not a trivial concern in a paper mill state with major rivers still on the Superfund list. But with a population under 1000, there aren't many homes for sale in Alna.

On the flip side, Blacksburg is cheap. The cost of living is a fraction of what it is in New England. Houses are cheap, health insurance is affordable, and taxes are minimal. Our disposable income would increase dramatically. Did I say increase? We might have a disposable income for the first time in years. Blacksburg is right up against the Appalachian mountains, and it is halfway between my family in Atlanta and my family in Baltimore. There are good people in the area raising organic food and playing my kind of music. The town of Floyd, forty minutes away, has a weekly old-time music jam. But Blacksburg is a university town (Virginia Tech) and it is neighbors with Christiansburg (deathly consumer sprawl), Radford (blue collar slums) and several munitions dumps (fortunately down river). The architecture off campus is slapped-together, twentieth-first-century, pre-fab America. It looks like anywhere and everywhere, and has no town center. While I am sure we will find our kind of people there, it doesn't thrill us like New England.

We are moving ahead with both Maine and Virginia, assuming that one or the other will eventually become impossible or impractical. Maybe Tall Oaks will reject our application. Maybe midcoast Maine will prove unaffordable. And of course, all of this presumes that we will be able to sell our current house in Montpelier, not a guaranteed option in the current real estate market.

April Fools

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Tue, 1 Apr 08 23:23:00 UT

Breakfast time. Hannah was finishing her last waffle strip. Drips of syrup trailing from the bowl, across the plate, and onto her pajama top as she leaned her head back to take a bite. I was maneuvering Joseph's plate around his mouth, trying to keep the waffle bite he was spitting out off the floor.

"Papa, I dont yike dese," said Joseph.

"Joseph, please, keep still." said I.

"Papa, may I be excused?" asked Hannah.

"Have you finished your water?" asked I.

"Yes!" she said.

"AND all your vitamins?"

"Yes, Papa, I finished them all."

"OK. You may be excused," I answered, and caught the last yellow bits off Joseph lips.

Hannah put her hands on the table and pushed her chair out, remembering for the first time in days to not slam it into the wall behind her. Halfway to the couch, she stopped and turned, her voice flush with excitement.

"Papa, I want to do a trick on my teacher."

"How's that?"

"It's April Fools today, and I want to play a trick on my teacher."

Ah, April Fools. I had forgotten. When I was in graduate school, living with four other friends, this was one of the highlights of the year. One member of the household, a handsome, charismatic fellow fond of practical jokes, was the target of our revenge. It was everyone against him. One young woman put a rubber band on the sink sprayer the night before so that when he turned on the faucet in the morning, he would get a dowsing. Except in the morning she came down in her pre-coffee stupor, and, with everyone in audience at the kitchen table, she turned on the sink and soaked herself, neck to belt. It took her ten seconds to understand what was happening and another ten seconds to figure out how to turn it off.

I had planned ahead and spent months stealing socks from his laundry in the dryer, one or two a week. On March 31st, I placed them all in leftover containers in the refrigerator with labels like "Chausette Du Jour" and "Argyle Flambee". Not only did he not notice his socks were disappearing, but he did not open any of the containers until several weeks after April Fools Day. It was a dismal failure all around.

"OK, Hannah. What were you thinking of?"

"I don't know! That's the problem. Can you help me think of an idea?"

I thought about it for a moment. Her teacher was a young woman who might well appreciate a harmless, humorous, sophisticated (for a five-year-old) trick. There were possibilities.

"OK, how about this? Tell her you've got a rare disease and..."

"No, Papa!"

"No? But ..."

"No!"

A definitive no. She doesn't even like where the idea is going.

"Hmm. OK, how about this. Tell her that today is a special Jewish holiday. Tell her ... tell her it is Nar B'Adar. This is the day when Jews commemorate Jacob stealing Esau's birthright. Then tell her ..."

"Paaapaaa! No!"

"I'll write it down on a note. You can just give it to her."

"Nooo!"

Perhaps my daughter has inherited her grandma's inability to tell a lie. She certainly can't keep a secret, and I knew she would blurt out "April Fools!" before her teacher could even finish reading such a note. This reminded me of something I read years ago in The Father's Almanac. Around age three or four, children begin to tell lies. It's yet another form of experimenting and testing limits, and like all such behaviors, the novelty of it is explored relentlessly. At this young age, a child isn't using lies to manipulate his or her parents. Not yet. Usually the lies are obvious, and the pleasure is simply in asserting something that is not true. Depending on the parental response and depending on the personality of the child, one of two things eventually happens. Either the child stops telling lies, or else they learn to get very, very good at lying.

Hannah went off to school without a plan. Oh well, I thought. Maybe in a couple of years, Joseph can pull it off. I didn't think anything about it until almost lunchtime when I heard Nola's "OH!" down the hall and then her laughter.

"What's up?" I yelled.

She appeared in the doorway holding something small in her hand.

"What is that?" I asked.

"This is Hannah's multi-vitamin from this morning. I just found it hidden under her breakfast plate."

Party Favors

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Mon, 31 Mar 08 23:23:00 UT

My children and I are all born in April, which makes the month crazy, fun, and expensive. Nola starts planning in February, and she continues until two weeks before D-Day when my procrastination sets up a flurry of last minute internet shopping. So this year we decided to contract out - a party at their gymnastics place. Hannah and Joseph, who attend the same Montessori school, will share a single party for the first and possibly last time.

The venue has a package deal; 90 minutes of wild running on balance beams, swinging on rings, jumping off spring boards, and leaping in pits filled with foam blocks, all followed by a half hour of cake, ice cream, and presents. This schedule is set by the venue and is non-negotiable, which is unfortunate for the parents of the guests. The sugar surge ought to come first. Instead, a simple and familiar biochemical process follows:

Caloric-depletion-mayhem + industrial sugar surge --> Screaming meltdown fit in the car ride home

Having already blown our budget on venue, cake, and presents, I went to Woodbury Mountain Toys during my lunch break to shop for party favors. The plan was to get each child some candy, a set of marbles, and a wind-up magnetic fishing game, but the fishing games were out of stock. I began to search to shelves for a replacement. I had been fighting a sinus infection for a week, and I wandered the store in an expectorant-induced fog. The sound track to a Harry Potter movie played overhead from speakers which didn't help my clarity.

The store had a good selection, but it was small, and therefore cramped, with narrow aisles between mazes of shelving. It is not a good store to wear a backpack in. For that matter, it is not a good store to bring small children with curious fingers into, but fortunately I was alone and unencumbered. I finally found the "unnecessary plastic objects" section and began picking through the mini bowling sets and magic tricks when I heard the somber brass tones and cascading violins on the speakers give way to a banjo and a gravelly voice shouting.

"Get out the way Old Dan Tucker. You're too late to come to supper."

I looked up at the manager behind the counter.

"I don't remember that song from any Harry Potter movie."

"Naw. That's Bruce Springsteen."

The Boss wailed several old time and children's favorites, backed up with banjos, brass, and glory chorusers. I grabbed several sets of squeeze-bulb-propelled styrofoam rockets, paid my bill, and stumbled into the bracing winter air. March 31st in Montpelier, and there is still plenty of snow on the ground, but at least my head began to clear.

A Place to Call Home

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Mon, 17 Mar 08 23:23:00 UT

Twenty-two thousand dollars. That's the maximum out-of-pocket expense we might conceivably pay for medical bills in a given year under our current insurance policy. This figure is above and beyond the $1100 monthly health insurance premium, which, thankfully, is mostly, but not entirely, covered by my employer. As it is, we've paid thousands of dollars over the past few years for the couple of procedures and surgeries we've needed.

It is, as far as we know, one of the most expensive health insurance policies offered, in one of the most expensive health care markets in the country. My Mom and I have done no little research into the matter looking for alternatives. For my part, I have scoured the internet, reading the fine print of plans offered in states across the Union, while Mom has caught her toe on concrete pavement seams across the globe, necessitating visits to some of the finest medical facilities in Europe, North America, and Asia. And in no place was she asked to pay an amount that came close to rivaling the bill from Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, Vermont.

Strike one.

--------------

The property tax rate in Montpelier Vermont is nearly $3 for every $1000 of property value. Even in Vermont, this is high for such a small town in a rural county. As Montpelier is the state capitol, there are a lot of churches and government buildings which do not pay property tax. When the city reassessed properties last year, the values of many houses went up drastically, while the assessment on the entire buildings and grounds of National Life Insurance - the only business of significant size located in the city - was slashed drastically. There were many, many errors in the accessor's database, which led to a citizen's revolt that succeeded in throwing out the entire assessment along with the accessor. But we are only delaying the inevitable. By law, the assessment must be done again, and no matter how the pie is eventually sliced, National Life will pay a much smaller portion, and homeowners will collectively make up the difference. This in addition to sales tax, gasoline tax, and state income tax.

Strike two.

--------------

When we first moved to town, there were only six houses on the market, none of which were suitable or affordable. Three months later when we finally found this house, we competed against five other bidders. The inspector we hired was a grizzled Vermont native of World War II vintage who told us, "This is the perfect size house - just a little too small for a family with teenagers." The furnace was the original 1950 furnace, a cracked, cast-iron behemoth that spewed an unending cloud of exhaust and creosote up the chimney during our first winter. The basement walls wept snow melt in the Spring until we could not get into the car without walking in puddles. Despite the state of the national real estate market, there is not a single house in Washington County available for sale that we can afford. This being the state capitol, there will always be a demand for the enormous Victorians littered about this town.

Strike three. We're out of here.

--------------

We are approaching the point where we can't afford to live here anymore. Or rather, we can't afford to live here in the lifestyle to which we would like to become accustomed.

This is a choice on our part. Clearly, Nola could go back to work and find a nine-to-five job that offered better health insurance. That would give us the health coverage, plus the income to cover the day care we would need for Joseph and Hannah and the pre-packaged or take-out food we would be eating more of. A lot of the house work would get shoved to the weekend, or simply not done. A lot of the fix-it tasks we do ourselves would be hired out. We would need a second car. There would be other adjustments, but people live this way. In fact, most people of our socio-economic class live this way. It is considered normal, and we love this area enough that it was tempting to normalize.

But we are choosing not to, and we are incredibly grateful for the fact that, despite that idiot in the White House and the shambles he has made of the economy, we can still opt out to a certain extent. We can still be home to watch our children grow up, to cook healthy meals from locally grown food, to manage easily with a single car. As long as we can find a place with reasonable health insurance and a better cost of living.

But where to? There are several factors to weigh. It would be nice to be within a day's drive of our family in Atlanta, however we do not culturally or climatically mesh with the South. We would like to have a Montessori school for our children, especially an elementary school for Hannah, one with a tuition rate we can afford, but we prefer smaller towns - population under 50,000. We would like enough rural farmland around that we could buy some acreage to do the serious gardening/farming we've dreamed of and to purchase the local produce that we can't grow ourselves. But we also want a town with a vibrant, walkable center, an educated population, a progressive, involved community, a decent bookstore and library, clean air and water, a functioning school system, and a better cost of living than Vermont. And the more we look at America, the better Canada looks (not that we can afford to live there either). We simply can't have everything, and the process of exploring our options has been a powerful exercise in defining our priorities.

A few postings about the places we've looked at is in the works, but in the meantime, what places do you think we ought to consider?

Customer Appreciation Night

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Thu, 13 Mar 08 23:20:00 UT

Montpelier has five bookstores, all of them independently owned. None of them are very large, but collectively they would fill a small Barnes and Nobles in one of America's more illiterate cities. The jewel of them all is Bear Pond Books, the only Montpelier bookstore that sells first run books and the only one which hosts talks and readings and parties. Their store is as wide as a Hummer and as long as a 747, with a single path down the middle wide enough for two people to pause, smile apologetically, and pass sideways, belly to belly. Down the street, the Book Garden is an even thinner store; even the bookshelves have to turn sideways. Rivendell is a used book emporium on a 100 year old, creaky, wooden floor that compresses underfoot, the kind of floor that a marble could spend all day rolling around and never find a resting spot. Black Sheep Books is a workers collective, a converted studio apartment full of material to feed your outrage. And last is The Yankee Paperback Exchange, a hole in the wall filled with romance, science fiction, horror, western, and thrillers - all selling for the same price they sold back in the 1950's; the Paperback Exchange is closing for good, and I'm sorry to see it go although I never bought a single leaf of yellowed paper there.

Bear Pond was recently purchased by the owners of Rivendell who have kept the quality of stock and the relaxed atmosphere. We received an invitation in the mail to come to a customer appreciation night - free refreshments and 20% off all books.

Thursday night is usually Dad's playgroup night. Thursday night I usually take the children to the family center basement play rooms, and Nola has some time to herself, ostensibly to read and drink tea, but often as not to catch up on the laundry folding. However Joseph had the sniffles, and Hannah has almost outgrown Dad's playgroup, so we decided to make a night of it - takeout pizza and unrestrained literary consumerism.

"Why are we going to the bookstore?" asked Joseph as I lifted him by the arm over the snow melt puddles in the potholes as we walked across the parking lot to the back door of the shop. Like his father before him, Joseph often doesn't know what is happening around him, even after he has been told multiple times. Perhaps his almost-three-year-old brain riffs out on asking the same question over and over and seeing what response he gets each time. It is the Peek-a-boo syndrome. It is the same urge that makes him push the button on the electronic toy that sings Frere Jacques and The Farmer In The Dell and Pop Goes The Weasel over and over.

In answer to his question, Nola says, "It's Customer Appreciation Night."

I don't know if this means anything to him, so I add, "They want to thank us for buying lots of books from them and invite us to buy some more."

The store was busy but not as crowded as it could be, and we immediately took the stairs up to the children's section. We made Hannah's week by scoring the latest Rainbow Magic Fairy series - The Pet Fairies. These are truly terrible books, but she loves them. The problem is not the content of the books - nothing to censure or the (ahem) explain when she's older, but the writing is insipid and formulaic - like the stale, late morning aftertaste of a Crispy Creme doughnut with coffee. At five years old though, I can hardly expect Hannah to be discriminating. Laura Ingles Wilder, Pippi Longstocking, and Ruby the Red Fairy cohabit peacefully in the same tenement of her bookshelf.

(Someday Hannah will be old enough to find this blog herself on the internet and read this posting. I can already hear her righteous indignation at my callous criticism of her beloved fairy books. All I will say in my defense Hannah is go to the back of your closet, or open the box in the basement, or head down to the nearest used bookstore and find something written by the legendary Daisy Meadows. Read it cover to cover and then decide of you want to rain indignation upon your Papa.)

After a negotiated treat of cookies and cupcakes (negotiated to avoid food allergies), Hannah settled into an independent routine of pulling books off the shelf, reading them, and putting them back. Nola and I took turns picking books off the shelf for the children and following Joseph around the store. He pointed out all the books on the shelves that we already own, touched everything with moving parts (puzzles, pop up books, card games) and then finally settled down in the corner where an gilded antique cash register sits on the floor. It has embossed vines and flowers all over it in tarnished brass and four columns of buttons for pennies, dimes, dollars, and type of payment - cash, credit, on account. You push a button from each column, except pennies and dimes because the buttons for 46 cents are stuck, and then you heave the crank around three times and the purchase appears in pop up cards behind glass at the top. This kept Joseph entertained for most of the evening.

There is something punishing about a bibliophile going to a bookstore with children. When it was my turn to be downstairs, I felt this intense pressure to find a something outstanding to read and to find it quickly so Nola would have enough time for her turn. But I wanted to socialize with people I knew, and there were fancy treats downstairs that weren't offered in the children's section, and I saw lots of books I might like to read, but nothing I was willing to gamble on. Time was running out.

Palms sweating, I asked one of the booksellers if they had a particular book by Wendell Berry that I had been looking for. It was a long shot, especially in a small bookstore. She didn't know the book or where it might be found in the store, but she was keen to help me and I was too well bred to just walk away. That damnable woman wasted precious minutes looking on the web and in their database and around the stacks, searching for a book I already knew in my heart they didn't have. Finally I grabbed a different collection by the same author as well as one of the decadent chocolate confections and raced upstairs to sub for Nola.

At 8:00 PM, it was time to go home. Despite Hannah's protests ("Why did you buy books for me and then not let me read them NOW?") I walked downstairs with our purchases, passing throngs of neighbors and friends, my eyes darting back and forth among the stacks looking for that Perfect Book that didn't exist.

"Can I help you?" asked the bookseller, her hands floating in the air over the counter to take whatever books I had brought to purchase. She seemed eager to consummate my delightful evening of browsing, not knowing my unfulfilled frustration.

I fixed her with my steely eye for a long second until and her hands lowered to her side. Only then did I drop a twelve-inch tall stack of books on the counter, all but three of which came from the children's section upstairs.

"Curse your bookstore!" I said.

The bill was over $150 even with the discount. We plan to dole out only one book a week to the children to make it last. At my current reading rate of one book a month, I think that is more than generous.

Ice

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Sun, 9 Mar 08 00:00:00 UT

Tonight I went downstairs in the dim light of my basement, and I stepped into a two inch puddle of water by the garage man door. The door, sitting six inches off the ground on a cinder block foundation, was certainly not at fault. Around the corner in the basement the floor drain was backed up. The back up began somewhere in the storm drain down the street, which might give you a sense of how much rain has been falling on top of how much snow in the past twenty-four hours.

Unlike previous years, the snow began falling in November instead of in February, and it never completely went away. If I were to cut a cross section through the layers of snow on my lawn, I'm sure carbon dating on the bottom layer would go back at least five months. A month ago, the weatherman predicted rain turning to freezing rain, which was the signal for everyone in Montpelier to climb up onto their roofs and push off the accumulated two feet of snow. The consequences of not doing this would be a solid two foot block of ice on the roof. Most Montpelier roofs can not handle this load. One business in town already suffered a major blow when its roof caved in last week.

For this purpose I have a telescoping roof rake, which makes an extremely fatiguing, day-long chore. After a half hour of that mishigos, I went to my next door neighbor who lent me a ladder long enough to get up on my roof, something I'm embarrassed to say I don't own. He also lent me his roof snow shovel, a two-foot-wide, plastic shovel with push handle. It resembles the front a bulldozer in form and function, but at a fraction of the weight and scale. You use it to push the snow off your roof. No lifting involved, and you don't need to raise you hands above your shoulders. You do, however, have to climb up on your roof.

Our roof has three different sections, and it took about four hours to do the entire job. The top layers of snow came off easily enough, but when I had excavated down to last December, I hit compressed snow that was the consistency and thickness of rigid insulation. It would not budge without a fight, and after four hours, I had no fight left in me. I let it stay. It would have been foolish pride to remove it and a pyrrhic victory to show for the effort. The layer was only an inch thick, and the rain would have (mostly) rolled right off it. Even with that concession, the consequence of all this exercise was a mostly clear roof, a restful sleep at night, and four foot snow drifts extending two arms length around the perimeter of my house. The rain never came.

Not that time, which was a month ago. Instead it began yesterday, with temperatures rising above freezing during the day and below freezing at night. This was both good and bad.

The good news is, downtown won't flood. The spring runoff can send chunks of ice downriver and create an ice jam, but it the weather flirts above and below freezing, then the snow melts at a manageable rate and the ice doesn't jam up.

The bad news is that this process doesn't work the same way in the storm sewers. They are underground below the frost line, but ice and trash can jam them up in just a few hours. It is rare, but it can happen and this is the first time we've ever seen it.

Also, this weather leaves ice all over the exposed road surfaces and is not terribly good for driving or walking. Our driveway ought to be a skating rink right now, but the endless dripping of water off the trees and the snow sliding off the embankments have created more of a lunar landscape unsuitable for ice skates. In a way, I prefer this, because you can't slip on the textured surface unless you really try. But unless we get several warm days, that ice will remain until Spring time, a month from now.

Vegetarian

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Sat, 8 Mar 08 23:38:00 UT

Today I ate a tuna fish sandwich. With mayonnaise and some chopped up celery on whole wheat bread. Just like Mom used to make and probably still does, though I wouldn't know since I have been a vegetarian for over 20 years. Not front-page headline news. Not any great feat of strength, skill, or daring. But as it was the first living animal I have intentionally eaten in over twenty years, I thought it worth a mention.

For the record, this was Tongas tuna, line-caught in Thailand and packed in spring water and sea salt. So it is low in heavy metals and safe to eat no more than twice a month. It comes in the same hockey puck can that it did twenty years ago. The "Chicken of the Sea" of my youth was usually packed in oil, laden with mercury, and served with much more mayonnaise than I used today. So the flavor today was lighter and fishier than I remembered, but still tasty. For twenty years, whenever people asked me what I missed from my pre-vegetarian days, I would truthfully answer "Tuna fish with mayonnaise on a toasted bagel served with a side of Sunday New York Times."

-------

My catalyst for becoming vegetarian in the first place was a week long stint at the East Wind farm commune in Missouri during college Spring break. A friend of mine (hi Jack!) and I had taken a course in Intentional Community, and decided to devise our own field trip. We had enough money to rent a car for exactly 24 hours, and so we drove in shifts round the clock from Philadelphia. We were motivated by our idealized image of communal life and the thrill of the open road. This trip coincided with the initial graying of my mother's hair. Coincidently.

Punchy and delirious, we reached the commune at the end of the ten mile dirt road in the middle of a stone field in the Ozarks. The Ozarks is a poor region of Missouri, and looking at the fields full of rocks, it wasn't hard to see why. The farmers who broke their plows on this land should have waited a few thousand years for the natural prairies and scrub pines and the occasional ice age to improve the organic material in the soil. But they were in a hurry, as were we. It was morning. We had a whole day ahead of us, and being polite young college boys, we found the people in charge (whom we had contacted in advance) and offered our services.

We got a tour of the buildings. They lived in small cabins with bunk beds and lanterns and not much else. A single community building served as kitchen, dining room, library, and town hall. There were acres of fields and their famous nut butter factory. Also there was a single, co-ed bath house which caused me no end of embarrassment. While I was stowing our gear in a cabin, Jack signed us up for our first work jobs. For him, it was several shifts in the nut butter factory. For me, it was days of shoveling manure out of a coop. Not a cooperative. A chicken coop.

I have yet to properly thank Jack for this.

Apparently, this dirty task had never been performed before in the entire history of this chicken coop, and they were just waiting for the right visitor to show up for the job. I was taken to the site and handed a shovel, and if the work was at all disagreeable, I consoled myself with revenge fantasies to be enacted on the ride home at the end of the week. My nose was completely unprepared for the stench, and at first I had to work bent over to avoid banging my head on the ceiling until d ays later when I reached the stony dirt floor and had a foot of clearance overhead.

On my first day, the poultry manager came to check on my work. Looking around he found a chicken too sick to stand. Without comment or ceremony, he grabbed it by the legs, dangled it upside down, pressed its head to the ground with his boot, and pulled. There was no squawk or cry, though of course that would have been impossible with its head clamped down. At first the wings flailed like a whirlygig, and then they slowed to a desultory flapping before stopping altogether.

Perhaps it was my somewhat sheltered suburban upbringing, or perhaps it was the hours spent breathing raw ammonia fumes, but I found this entire drama strikingly pathetic. In comparison to the factory poultry system of our country that treats animals with exquisite cruelty and indifference, this chicken had lived as sheltered a life as I had lived, and it had met a quick and merciful end. Yet I would not have been able to kill it myself, certainly not in what I considered at the time to be such a callous manner. And being the inquisitive, introspective, annoying college student that I was, I then asked myself, "Then why is it OK to let others do it for you?" I don't recall what became of the bird afterwards, but I spent the rest of the week carefully avoiding chicken at the communal meals.

Of course, if I had the moral integrity that I professed I had, I would have quit eating meat right then. But it wasn't until graduate school, when I joined a vegetarian housing co-op and I learned how to shop and cook and eat a vegetarian diet that I stopped eating meat. I rarely told people the real reason why. There are plenty of good reasons to not eat meat - environmental, ethical, political, economical, and health to name a few. I knew of all these reasons, but none of them were my reason.

My reason had to do with the act of killing the animal, an act I was too squeamish to perform. My reason was because I was a coward wrapped in personal ethics. My reason was that I was not brave enough to slaughter my own dinner. It is not a reason one can be terribly proud of. If people said to me, "Oh, you're vegetarian. You must like animals," I would dissemble, "No, I hate plants."

This was 1989. Vegetarianism was still a radical idea, and my family responded as you might expect. I did not proselytize, and they felt guilty anyway. It was like having a priest in the family, without the pride. Everyone offered me salad and other rabbit food and apologized for eating meat in my presence. Everyone, that is, except my youngest brother, who went out of his way to wave his hamburgers and pepperoni pizza slices in my face at every possible opportunity. He seemed to take my choice as either a personal affront or an irresistible dare, or perhaps he simply enjoyed tormenting me, a old family tradition I share with my brothers. Certainly, his career in theatre has given him vast experience in the conventional food service industry, and he loves meat, especially bar-be-cue. His opinion was that humans evolved eating meat, therefore it must be good for us. Sound logic - we are an omnivorous species and we have a shorter gut and sharper incisors for a reason - but at the time I only replied "Yes we can eat meat, but we don't have to."

Mom, of course, worried I wouldn't get enough protein (ping! went another hair). But I ate plenty of dairy and eggs, justifying that I could raid a nest or milk a cow without any scruples. I was never in any nutritional danger as far as I knew.

Nor did I stop anyone from eating meat around me. When my best friend from high school visited, we took him to a place in town we knew had excellent steak but also had vegetarian options. During the meal, I asked him how his food was, and he answered with the dry wit he is famous for, "Very good. I can taste the fear."

Over time, family and friends got used to my diet. When I went home for Thanksgiving and other family reunions, Mom would serve a spinach quiche or eggplant parmesan alongside the beef bourguignon. People stopped treating me differently. Even my younger brother let up and occasionally ate a salad in my presence. We all got older. We got married. We had children. There were simply more important things to think about.

Twenty years passed.

-----

When my Dad went to the hospital for emergency triple-bypass surgery, it was a terrible shock, but not an inordinate surprise. He had smoked for years, and didn't start exercising regularly until he was nearly 50 years old when he also quit smoking. He survived the surgery, and he was healthier afterwards than he had been in years. After a tense month or two, we let the memory of it fade into the past. Then at the age of thirty-nine, my younger brother went to the emergency room for the exact same emergency triple-bypass surgery. He also survived, but it was less easy to return to our complacent lives.

Mom sat us down and told us the family health history. Her parents, and all her parents' brothers and sisters, died in their sixties from heart failure, some quite suddenly. My parents and my three brothers all take medication for high cholesterol and/or high blood pressure, including my two older brothers who are not overweight, who do not smoke, who exercise regularly, who do all the things that are supposed to be good for your heart. My cholesterol and blood pressure had always been fine, but I was undeniably in a high risk category.

Everyone in the family took it for granted that through my vegetarian diet, I had dodged the bullet. This was the twenty-first century and what with the NIH findings, the publicity on cholesterol, and finally Mad Cow disease, they had all cut back their meat consumption. But not one of them ever seriously entertained the idea of becoming vegetarian. It was the priest thing again, only with the pride added back in - admiring his reflective, spiritual lifestyle without having any desire to actually live that way. After all, they might die younger than me, but they would die with a smile on their faces, the schmaltz still sheeny on their lips.

I took all this family data to my doctor to get her opinion. We tested my cholesterol and learned that my bad cholesterol was low, but for the first time ever my good cholesterol was also a little lower than it ought to be.

"How much exercise do you get?" she asked.

"For cardiovascular fitness, I walk five feet from my bed to my desk at least twice a day. For strength and conditioning, I lift my toddler off the ground whenever he asks, and as a consequence, my left pectoral muscle is now twice as large as my right."

"Yes, I noticed." she answered. "Well, your numbers are not a big deal, but given your family history, I want to treat this aggressively. I'd like your children to still have a father when they grow up. Take an aspirin a day and see me in a few months."

"Do I have to?"

"Yes."

Daily medication. Feh. I had always dreaded the day when I would have to take some sort of medication every day. Once I started down this slippery slope, there would be no climbing back out of the abyss. But I took those little pink pills every morning with breakfast and they tasted as bitter on my tongue as they did on my fragile self-image. I was getting old. First I started getting back pain. Then I was an uncle at a bar mitzvah. And now this.

But I started to exercise. I made time for it, even at the expense of time with my wife and family, who supported me on this. And in truth, I did feel better. It wasn't long before I got the time back, because I found I didn't need to sleep so much. In six months I went back to the doctor.

"OK, doc. How's my cholesterol?"

"Fine. Everything is back in the normal range."

"Great. I want to stop taking the aspirin."

"You really don't like taking medication, do you?"

"What's the risk if I do this?"

"Well, as long as your cholesterol and blood pressure remain normal, the risk is low to non-existent. Let's just keep checking your numbers every year."

-----------------

I love Michael Pollan, a writer who specializes in food production in this country. Years ago I had read his "Botany of Desire," a tongue-in-cheek examination of the hypothesis that certain plants have evolved to take advantage of human desires to get themselves propagated. This book is in four sections, matching a plant to a human desire that it exploits: sweetness = apples, beauty = tulips, control = potatoes, ecstasy = cannabis. The book is full of interesting natural and human history, including the true story of Johnny Apple Seed and a retelling of the Dutch tulip debacle that makes our current housing crisis look like a soap opera. It is one of the few non-fiction books in which I enjoyed every single page. I especially enjoyed his description of his visits to conventional vs. organic potato farmers and his digs at Monsanto.

I got on the organic bandwagon soon after becoming vegetarian, and the only thing I truly hated Bill Clinton for was signing the creation of a watered-down, national organic standard. Before this law passed, there were strong local standards in place all over the country, enforced by private or public organizations, that worked with the unique agricultural issues in each region. Organic food was a growing niche market within the larger food industry that was struggling to create new markets and new demands. After all, you can convince people to replace their TV every year, but there is a limit to how much food a person can eat (though apparently there are companies who are tinkering with that as well, contributing to our obesity epidemic). The food industry wanted "in" on the organic market. In fact, they wanted more than "in." They wanted all of it. And they succeeded. In one fell swoop of his pen, Bill Clinton delegitimized all the local organic standards replacing them with a weaker, industry-friendly version that allows a national producer to put "ORGANIC" on a product that contains only 95% organic ingredients while a local organic farmer can no longer afford the increased cost of certification.

So when friends recommended Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma," I read it cover to cover. And then I read his "In Defense of Food." And then I read "Real Food" by Nina Planck, and even "Nourishing Traditions" by Sally Fallon. I would recommend all of them, except perhaps the last which has lots of good information but is a bit more rigid and militant for my taste. Pollan is more accessible, but for solid information, Planck is best. All of these books refer to the growing body of research, and more importantly, the growing body of debunked research, that is changing the way people think about food, nutrition, and health.

I won't soap box or proselytize here. You can read the books if you are interested. What I want to say is that these books convinced me of two things. The first is that, if we accept the premise that my diet is responsible for my heart-healthy outlier status in my family, then it was because I ate organic food as much as possible. The second is that, it did in spite of, rather than because of, being vegetarian.

All those years ago when my brother told me, "We evolved as meat eaters for a reason," I should have listened more closely. There are any number of nutritional factors, some of which have only recently been discovered and researched, that either aren't available in plants, or which are not as easily absorbed in the body from plants as opposed to animals.

Now, the fact is, I dodged the bullet on this one too. Because I wasn't vegan. When people said to me, "You're vegetarian, you must eat healthy," I would answer, "Ice cream is vegetarian. Creme brulee is vegetarian." I ate eggs and dairy, and to be honest, I ate a lot of them, more than the U.S. National Institute of Health thought I should. But I don't really care anymore what they recommend. Frankly, the Bush administration is not the first administration, by far, to water down or replace scientific advice for political expediency. I diligently read ingredient labels, but I no longer read the Nutritional Information on packages in the grocery store, partly because I no longer think it is useful, and partly I am trying to stop buying the packaged food in the first place.

But as I have learned, or at least as I now choose to believe, I need to supplement my diet with flesh. Perhaps in another twenty years, I will choose to believe otherwise, or will be proven wrong by convincing scientist research. It is somewhat like the movie "Sleeper" in which Woody Allen wakes up in a distant future world only to learn that cigars and booze are extremely healthy. Who knows? But for now, I am fairly confident that I need at least fish in my diet. In my boy scout days, I caught and killed fish, so I don't feel I would be breaking my ethical code to eat a can of tuna. I am reluctant to consider more than fish, mostly because of how meat is raised and processed in this country. Moral scruples aside, if the abattoirs of this country opened their doors to public inspection, most people would lose their appetite for chicken, pork, and beef. Even with fish, it is difficult to find any without heavy metals, chemicals, or fertilizer run off. And the other nice thing about fish, for someone falling from vegetarian Grace, is that it leaves a lingering odor in your kitchen that, over time, will force you to confront whether you really want to do this. Plus it won't trayf your kitchen .

Quick Plug

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Fri, 7 Mar 08 08:41:00 UT

I have several blog entries that I have started, but none completed. So to reward those of you who keep checking, I thought I'd offer a plug for another blog that I really enjoy. It's called "People Reading" and the woman who runs it roams the streets of San Francisco looking for people reading books in public. If they are willing, she takes their picture and inteviews them about what they are reading and what their favorite books are and what book they would write if they ever decided to write a book. It's a fascinating slice of life for bibliophiles, which I suspect many of my readers are.

I found out about this blog because she took her shtick on tour, DogEared, a two month vacation traveling across the United States by Greyhound bus, interviewing people across the United States, and one of the places she stopped was Montpelier. Great stories en route.

Hope you enjoy it!

Toof!

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Thu, 14 Feb 08 21:45:00 UT

Thursday night is Dad's Playgroup night, but it was canceled this week. So for Valentine's Day, we stayed home and watched The Aristocats video on a fifteen inch screen. Joseph thought is was "a yittle scary", but Hannah giggled every time the dogs or Edgar did a prat fall, and Nola got to say, "Where's My Beddy-Bye Basket!" which has been her favorite line from the movie for nearly four decades.

We then had a grand tooth brushing party in the bathroom. I was pretty frazzled after a long day, so I had a bit of trouble getting the floss for Hannah on my fingers. Hannah's dentist recommended a year ago or so that we floss between her first and second molars as they are quite close to each other. But tonight I just couldn't do it. I got all confused, and couldn't figure out where I was supposed to put the floss.

"Which molars am I supposed to floss between.... Oh my God!" I exclaimed.

I really need to get this phrase out of my vocabulary before Hannah picks it up. I don't want her to be one of those teenagers who say it all the time as a run-together, single-word phrase.

"What, Papa?"

"Hannah, you have a new tooth. There's an extra molar behind the other two on your lower right."

"Let me see!"

Nola looked up from where she was brushing Joseph's teeth. Even Joseph stopped screaming in her ear.

"Did her six year molar come out?"

"Yeah! The whole thing is right there. I swear it wasn't there last night!"

Turns out another one has the point sticking through. Her front tooth is still wobbly and has been for weeks, so I guess the molars got tired of waiting for their turn.

Story Walk

mkatinsky@verizon.net — Wed, 13 Feb 08 22:50:00 UT

Montpelier is a wee, sleepy, little town. Here, we roll the sidewalks up each night, and whichever Seventh Day Adventist is responsible for unrolling them in the morning, he or she tends to sleep late on Sunday. Yet once again, I solved the weekly dilemma of what to do with Joseph while Nola and Hannah were busy at Sunday School.

Which is to say that there isn't much to do on a winter Sunday morning in Montpelier. The snow is usually too dry for snowballs or snowmen or snow forts, and the ice is never thick enough to skate on. Sledding outdoors and hot chocolate indoors is about it. So some creative people came up with an idea called Story Walk.

The plan is simple. You take a children's book, rip out the pages, laminate them, and post them a hundred feet apart down some path until you've created a mile-long family walk outdoors. In the summer, Hubbard Park hosted a story of a bear waking from hibernation whose name I can't recall. In the autumn, the North Branch Nature Center led us through the "Gardener's Alphabet". And now, throughout downtown Montpelier, "Olivia" graces the store shop windows.

Joseph was game for the entire walk. "Papa, can we go see another Olivia picture?" he asked after every page. I don't quite think he got the concept that it was a book.

The streets were mostly deserted under the gray sky. We walked a short mile from store to store, all of them closed, and stopped to watch the North Branch River every time we crossed it.

For me, more interesting than the book itself, which I've no doubt read ten times to Hannah in the last two years, was seeing which member shops of the Montpelier Downtown Community Associate chose not to participate. The bookstores were on board, with full displays of all the Olivia books surrounding whichever individual page they were assigned, but the NECI restaurants were sadly passed over. Each of the two competing hardware stores had a page, because neither could let the other get the upper hand, but the banks and real estate agencies found it beneath their dignity, I suppose.

We did the entire loop, reading every page, all the way to "I love you anyway too." Then we cut across the street to La Brioche for a muffin, even if they were a non-participating NECI restaurant.

"What kind of muffin do you want, Joe?"

"Ummmmmmm.... Pumpkin... No! Corn!"

I ordered lemon poppyseed, and we spent ten minutes strewing crumbs over the small table and the floor beneath.

---

Nola and I had a date that afternoon, once of the precious two dates planned for the month. Babysitter coming at 1:00 PM which was also the time Hannah was supposed to be at a birthday party for a synagogue friend. It was rush rush rush until we looked out the window and saw the blizzard, the very first blizzard we've seen in Vermont. The sky rained ice and sleet and the wind tipped it over horizontal. We heard the thumps on our roof as large blocks of frozen snow fell off the pine trees branches a hundred feet up. From the front window, you could not see the street a bus length away. I quickly checked the internet weather report and read "Winter Storm Warning", "Ice", "Sleet", "Thundersnow".

Thundersnow? Really?

We were not going to drive our minivan in this. I called and told our relieved babysitter not to come, but by the time I hung up, the weather was calming. In another ten minutes, it had disappeared, leaving branches and snow everywhere. The roads were still a mess, but the wind had died down considerably.

"Hannah, do you want to walk to the party?"

"Great idea, Papa!"

I called the hostess and told them we would be a little late. Then we dressed for the Arctic and headed outdoors, Hannah thrilled and excited and chattering away. We walked down the steep slope where Towne Street connects to the top of Main Street, and there was a police car blocking the road. A young man in uniform got out of the car.

"Is there a problem, officer?"

"Well, there's black ice all the way down Main and two cars are off the road, so we're not letting traffic through."

Hannah and I walked over the lip of the hill and saw the cars, nose deep in the snowbank where the road curves ninety degrees, drivers and passengers clustered about them wringing their mittens while another officer talked on his radio. A little further down the road, the sidewalk ended and started up again on the other side, so we skated across the empty road in our boots. There was a good half inch of slick, frozen slush, crusty and clear, as though a tanker truck full of Karo syrup had spilled its load at the top of the road. I could see swerving tire tracks in graceful, curved V's, like a series of wave crests, bouncing off the curb on the side of the road. I felt bad for whoever had the misfortune to be out driving when the storm struck. Then a car pulled out of a side street in front of us.

As soon as all four wheels were on Main St., they began to spin, and the car listed to port. It crept up the hill slower than we were walking down it. The windshield began to fog up, but I could still see the young woman in the passenger seat, quiet, stiff, and wide-eyed. The driver rolled down his window to see better, and though the sidewalk was on the passenger side, I yelled, "Hey, it's ice all the way up and the police are stopping traffic from coming down!" I left out the gratuitous "You Idiot."

He heard. He managed to do a three-point turn in the road and get his car pointed downhill, yelling "Thank You" from the window as he passed.

In twenty minutes, we were at the party, where a half dozen girls from the Sunday school were sledding down a small hill in the backyard.

"Hey Hannah!" they all yelled when she came into view, and she smiled but was too shy to answer back. She's the youngest in the school by at least a year or two, but it is a small Jewish community and they all stick together. Not one is over ten years old, but you can already tell which one will be the comedian, the school paper editor, the leader of the pack, the quiet introspective, the pretty girl every boy wants to date. And you can tell that they think of Hannah as one of them, which is immensely gratifying to me.

While Hannah went sledding, I spent the next twenty minutes reviewing the frozen pizza and cake mix ingredients, apologizing profusely to the birthday girl's father for the havoc I was creating. After our legendary trip to the hospital, I will not allow Hannah to eat something that even says, "Made in a facility that also processes tree nuts." I realize that Unilever and their ilk probably process tree nuts in all their factories without labeling it on their products, and I am therefore discriminating against those progressive companies that care enough to let me know the truth. But tree nuts are poison to her. Would you eat something with a label that said, "Made in a facility that also processes cyanide?"

Fortunately, the hosts were very understanding, possibly because they are only strictly kosher Jews in a fifty mile radius and are used to being as much a nuisance as we are. The father summed it in a very nice, spiritual fashion that he has. "Some people choose to be vegan or vegetarian, and others, HaShem makes the choice for them. HaShem chose for us to be kosher, and clearly He chose that Hannah should not eat tree nuts."

A half hour later I walked home. The ice was gone, crushed, pulverized, and melted under the unremitting traffic of persistent (You Idiot) drivers. There was traffic up and down Main Street now, without the slightest lurch or slip. Trudging up the hill through drifts of sloppy, unplowed snow in the sidewalks, I started to peel off layers of sweaty clothing. By the time I got home, it was as if the Little Blizzard That Couldn't, in fact, Hadn't, but it was too late to call back the baby sitter. So while Joseph slept, Nola and I played Scrabble and finished off the last of the pound cake, even though our house rule is sweets are only for Shabbat.

Sh, don't tell the children.