¿Sabes por qué?

I don’t think we were Pleasantville on purpose. I don’t think any of the teachers I had, as I grew up in Anne Arundel County public schools, or the administrators, planned, as part of a calculated agenda, to pretend the continent south of us didn’t exist.

I guess, at the time, it was commonly assumed that European history was more, I don’t know..., relevant for a bunch of kids who were all descended from European immigrants. (You mean we weren’t all? Well, yes, there were a few darker complexions, and some funky last names ending in vowels--but that didn’t count, did it?)

I guess we talked about England because maybe they seemed the most like us, and then there was that whole business with Johnny Tremain, minutemen, and wet tea, so it was hard to exclude England. It was ok to talk about Greece and Rome too, because they did stuff like invent the architecture we used for our big buildings, and think up the Olympics.

But I can scarcely think of a reference to Central or South America prior to A.P.U.S. History and the Panama Canal.

Obviously, now, in the 21st C., Pleasantville’s plastic picket fence has been cracked in a few places. And I’ve stopped and looked around, and found--to my pleasure--that it’s really not unpleasant at all. There are lots of people around here who speak Spanish. That’s a big reason I’m trying to learn it. And though we don’t seem to be able to give more than a cursory glance to cultural issues in my clase de Español, I enjoy the textbook--primarily because of the snippets of insight into Latin American culture which were completely invisible in my childhood education, despite the relative geographic proximity of those cultures.

Shake, Rattle, and (with luck) Roll.

Before you can teach a kid to drive a clutch you have to observe your own techniques more closely than usual--that which you do instinctively may not be something you’ve broken down into its component parts lately.

It took me a bombed session or two with the first kid before I observed myself.
Now I’ve learned to describe the technique as a subtle balance between pressing the accelerator and releasing the clutch. Have you ever noticed? It’s the clutch which controls your initial acceleration in first gear--not the gas.

Daughter #1 got the hang of it, and was turned loose once she’d passed “The Hill.” That’s a rite of passage where we start at the bottom of an abandoned marina driveway and climb up, in 20 foot increments, starting on a significant incline each time.

Daughter #2 was somewhat vexed by my dogged insistance that our “extra car” must be a stick--but given a choice between Little Blue--the manual transmission Subaru Outback, and a clunky, dinged minivan, her motivation to learn has materialized.

Our first session today was, well, not half bad. A big point I’ll need to make tomorrow is that if you’re off to a shaky start, you need to hit the clutch again before the car’s tremors hit 8 on the Richter scale. I’m hoping the Community College will be sufficiently neglected by its often obnoxious Public Safety dudes tomorrow--Easter Sunday, that we can take advantage of the emptiness to actually hit 3rd gear a few times. Our local community is, unfortunately for this pursuit, too hilly and curvy to get an inexperienced shifter out of 2nd.

And then--The Hill. After which, the spouse gets his dinged minivan back.

raining, pouring

Our house in Baltimore had some leaky roof problems. In fact, in our entire history of renovating properties, leaking roofs have been the bane of our existence. All of this reached a horrifying climax in our nine months of rooflessness here on Avondale Circle. Nine months. 25 plastic garbage cans. 5 rooms with caved ceilings. And a few more giant steps toward either total insanity or the placidity of a cow eating clover. (not sure which, but then, neither is the cow.)
Now we have a roof which is so uber-engineered that it not only won’t leak, it would most likely survive a nuclear detonation. So, no more leaks, right? Wrong. Water doesn’t have to be rain. It can come from your very own kids’ shower head. And your very own tile, that you installed (inexpertly) your very own self is even more vulnerable to failure than any old roof shingles. Tupperware, and and a fortuitously unfinished kitchen ceiling are handling the problem for now. I hope some generously applied marine caulk will handle it for later. But someday, I hope to know--what is the cosmic significance of water, falling where one doesn’t want it? There’s got to be a metaphor in there somewhere.

frankly...

I envy people who are in a position to say whatever's on their minds...well, at least a little. I guess the Pope can't, and most politicians shouldn't, even though they might. Young people, maybe, can blog with more abandon, because the children they'll later embarrass or screw up aren't around yet, so you don't notice them.

La casa loca

Fredfred the dog is very happy to be downstairs, finally. It’s been her unfortunate lot to be confined in Olivia’s room from 7:30 to 3:30 daily this week.
The good news is that this means we have a construction crew at work on the family room, and we presume that they do not fancy nips in the fanny.

Sadly, the cats find that the positioning of their cage in the kitchen is as unsatisfying to their sense of feng shui as it is to mine, but it will be returned to its place by the sunny family room window sooner or later, and anyway, if you’re the sort of creature who pees indiscriminantly you’ve pretty much signed away your two-cents in the interior design scheme.

The fact that we have construction hirees at all is the result of an intervention of sorts--in this case it was 3 of Jeff’s siblings who felt compelled to confront him. “Face it bro’,” they said, “you’re a bite-off-more-than-you-can chew-aholic, and you’re asphyxiating yourself. Furthermore, we’re afraid your saintly, albeit somewhat cranky, wife will give you the heave-ho sooner or later and we don’t want to take you in. Heaven knows, we’ve got enough personality quirks of our own without having you honking on your saxophone in our basements.

(a quick aside about Jeff: he did not think it would be that much trouble to live in a house with no roof for 9 months, catching the rain in 30 garbage cans. He does not think it would be that much trouble to dredge down to the Severn River to create our own Fallingwater, or import our own herd of buffalo so we can pretend we live on the great Plains. (One of these statements is true--you guess.) I have learned. Slowly, but I've learned. Now, this is as far as I'll compromise: We can hire a grizzled old cook whom we'll call "Hank," who will rustle him up some grub when he gets tired of Flatbread pizzas from the freezer.

So, Jeff has been strong-armed into a sensible, workable, kind of game plan. This does not, however, change the fact that I, as a matter of course, must still hide my hairbrush, my toothbrush, the kitchen broom, and my personal tools if I ever want to see them again. Additionally, I just ran a bright orange extension cord to the pc so Becca could do homework, since when Jeff unsuccessfully diddled with the light fixtures in the computer room today, he forgot to undiddle before he went to work.

not funny

I hate painting ceilings. Oh, I’ve got a pole all right, to stick my roller on, and it’s really not a tricky job in the technical sense, but all that looking up leaves me feeling in need of chiropractic help. I don’t blame Michelangelo at all for being agonized--I just wonder where the ecstasy came in.

I can’t update my blog because I don’t feel funny. At all. It’s not that I’m not as surrounded by the absurd as usual--I most certainly am. Why just this morning the circuit that the coffee maker’s plugged into decided, completely arbitrarily, to take a coffee break. I tracked it down pronto--it was the switch between the one that handles all our auxiliary oil radiators and the one that sends every clock-radio in the house into flashing seizures. But I could discern no reason for its lapse of work ethic. It’s possible that the ghost who hangs out by the basement stair when Jeff toots his saxophone got tired of waiting for him to get home from exercise class and threw the switch in protest.