Ræmboʊ Come Home

He's 16 pounds and about two years old, he's all boy, and the dog is afraid of him.

He's The Cat Formerly Known as Rambo. And he's the newest addition to my home.

The daughter chose him for his big saucer eyes, which aren't well captured in this photo. Those eyes make him appear permanently startled, a state of mind that is good preparation for my household.

Within an hour of his homecoming, he was already tired of the little basement office where we'd put him and was freely exploring the house. He's absolutely at his ease now.

There was one glitch. Confronted with a pristine pan of highest-quality, odor- and dust-free, processed-wheat kitty litter (the latest thing in kitty products), Rambo tucked in and began eating like there was no tomorrow. When I brought it upstairs, the dog began eating it. This necessitated still another trip to the pet store (where they are starting to have my frequent buyer card number memorized) to buy something that would read as unmistakeably appropriate to poop in and inappropriate for all other uses. Now all is, um, going well.

The only other thing holding me back from total enthusiasm when we brought him home was the cat's name. I mean who ever heard of a cat named Rambo?

Okay, a lot of people who ride cabs in West Palm Beach.

But seriously. Whether he earned the name from his hunky girth or from his crazy eyes, how was this cat going to fit into my neuraesthenic, literary, and altogether unathletic household?

My generous and knowledgeable bliend Grammaticus came up with the solution: change the spelling, save the cat's dignity.

So Rimbaud, welcome home.

five good things

I have Liz at be present, be here to thank for this lovely, simple, life-affirming meme.









Five Good Things About Today

1. Pancakes with lemon curd, Stuart's newest innovation

2. Saw the Jim Henson exhibit at the Smithsonian

3. Julia's Empanadas for dinner

4. Watched Harry Potter 2 on DVD with my daughter

5. My basement cleaning project, which has been going on for three weeks and has resulted in boxes and boxes of give-away, as well as bags and bags of trash, is finally yielding new workspace and maybe even play space for me and Mona.

Okay. Now it's your turn.

The Steampunk Desktop

Steampunk refers to a subgenre of cyberpunk that is taken up with the pleasures and regrets of the Age of Steam.

So much so, that steampunks will go to great lengths to outfit their modern conveniences--such as this LCD monitor--to resemble machines from yesteryear.

Check out the amusing and informative (if not always user friendly) Steampunk Workshop for all sorts of ideas on outfitting your latterday gear with brass fittings and analog charm.

Daily Affirmations with Donald Winnicott

So my year is going well, though I still haven't located a source for Day of the Dead-themed magnetic grocery list pads.

But I did pick up a Mexican Talavera bathroom sink instead.

No. I really did. It was considerably more expensive than my first idea for domestic bliss.

The contractor arrives to demolish the old bathroom on Monday.

But that's not what I wanted to discuss today. Today, a chilly January Saturday, I have four beautiful children under my wing. They are playing Risk at the dining table behind me as I write this. Everything is good. So..what?

I have this friend, see, this marvelous friend, whom I won't name, though I will point you to her blog right here...this marvelous friend, who not only likes but loves me, and lets me know everyday that she values me..and, see, well...

She's just better at stuff than me. She has this touch with all things domestic and many things worldly. She is smart, beautiful, usually calm, almost always happy, a terrific writer who has now does radio commentary, a stunning knitter, and now a glass artist, starting a new business making stained-glass windows.

Yes. She is that kind of person.

And she is absolutely marvelous with children. You could leave your kid with her for a day and a half--I have done it for three--and she will never bat an eye, and you can leave secure in the notion that your kid is if anything having a BETTER time with her than at home with you.

At the end of the day, time spent at her house is infinitely more peaceful and happy than time spent at mine.

And it's not the bathroom demolition, though that won't help any. It's just that if I have four kids, I have three bagels, and even if I can set the table nicely, I still have boxes of windowblinds waiting to be hung in the dining room.

But I remind myself that Anne would and will tell me that she doesn't love me for the number of bagels I keep in the house, and she wouldn't love me more if I suddenly grew an aptitude for crafts and could knit my way out of a paper bag. She trusts me with her kid.

The literature on raising kids actually singles out a person like me for special praise. Nine years ago, when we were having our babies, my friend Jamie directed me to the concept of the "good-enough mother," in the words of Donald Winnicott:

"The good-enough mother...starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant's needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant's growing ability to deal with her failure" (Winnicott, 1953)

So that's me, right on target, not by strategy but by nature: confessing to my daughter finally that there is a ten-minute slice of my day--the time when I am changing from work clothes to home clothes--when I don't want to hear her calling me unless something is on fire. Or Playing Family Hold Back with my kids on the milk and bagels. Or shifting the piles in the dining room to the piles in the basement, like that's going to help my housekeeping.

And here's me, looking in my best friend's son's eyes, seeing that he's doing fine here playing Risk and chilling with my stepson, stepdaughter, and daughter.

And here's me, looking in the funhouse mirror of my blog-post, saying with Stuart Smalley,

"I deserve good things. I am entitled to my share of happiness. I refuse to beat myself up. I am attractive person. I am fun to be with. "

i'm one to talk...

...or hadn't you noticed?

After posting this tasteless screed, I am hardly the first person you'd expect to take anyone else to task for their own lapses, but this is no ordinary person, this is David Byrne.

Brilliant artist, conceptual genius, insomniac demon of the lymphatic shadow of the heart. Oh, and, formerly known as the lead singer of the Talking Heads.

The man who gave us the phrases "stop making sense" (overused) and "making flippy floppy" (underrated).

Someone needs to kick him to the curb and show him where the pooper bags are kept. (Okay, so I have been spending too much time with Cobber, so what?)

For a long time I have been a fan of Byrne's web site, and especially his peripatetic and always surprising journal, even if he doesn't accept comments (a sin and a lost opportunity, even in a celebrity blog. He doesn't have to read them, for cripes's sake).

Byrne travels a lot, and we armchair surfers get to benefit from his observations. Recently he was in London, and got to meet all sorts of people you and I never will. Plus he saw stuff any one of us might, but he really saw it. Which I have to admit you and I never might. Right?

Lately, although I admit the art form dictates that much of any bloggist's blogorrhea be about him/herself (and I am Exhibit A), Byrne's entries have carried a distinctly plummier, smarmier, name-dropping tone, especially when delivered with the occasional moue of apologetic self-deprecation.

Could this be because he crossed the Big Pond for a visit? (Crossed back, to be exact, though if his parents had not crossed the first time, he'd possibly be helping his native state of Scotland work its way toward independence right now).

I mean what else is a longtime-fan-firsttime-stalker to make of...

...this:

"CS and I have dinner by ourselves at a hip restaurant where she is spotted by another former gallerist who later says he was dying to introduce her to Lucien Freud, who was also dining there."

Or this:

"...We are sitting next to a largish couple from Northern Ireland who, to be honest, don’t seem to belong in such a groovy temple. (Here I go applying my own class evaluation.) He’s an IT functionary in town for business meetings and she’s riding on the expense account tab, or so I would guess. They look like northerners on holiday in the big city, but they mention that they’re staying next door at the Ritz, which is more than an ordinary branch manager could afford."

And, finally, this:

"They explain some of the local dishes — Jersey Royals are a miniscule type of potato only available at select times of year. Either from a glass of wine or something medical the woman has turned bright red — all over, face, neck, arms — but they’re so unassuming and easygoing and lacking all pretense that her redness doesn’t register after a minute or two."

How nice of you to notice that you hadn't noticed.

David, we hardly knew ye.

Now I know what you're thinking. David Byrne himself has ever professed a kind of self-advertising humility in album titles like More Songs About Buildings and Food and art installations like Furnishing the Self--Upholstering the Soul. So of course it's only fitting he should lapse into a litany of gee-whiz-I-can't-believe-this-is-my-life brags when he goes out there.

But who the F is CS, and Y does DB have to be so CKR-TF about her?

(If you can read this, congratulations, you either txtmssg 2 mch or loved William Steig as a kid)

Never mind. At the end of the day, Byrne knows we still love him. And if I want to read a blog that isn't self-aggrandizing, I'll be waiting a long time.

But I can't help wondering what my posting style would be like if I emulated David Byrne's:

"Took MS to PHES today. Her big poster installation was due and we'd been putting the finishing touches to it during breakfast. It was a map of the State of Massachusetts for her class's Spring Final (we'll go on to the DC Public Schools Biennale and perhaps onto Bellagio's Internationale if this works out).

Aspects of the work represent a real departure for her: some of the areas of the poster were done in traditional poster paints, some in colored pencil. I added my own touch, adhering a foam sticky-flower to the location on the map where her grandparents live, while MS invoked Boston's undersung Jewish heritage by drawing a Mogen David to indicate the state capital. That this was an inadvertent gesture only adds to its charm, I think.

Had dinner last night with SH and, of course, MS, who goes with me virtually everywhere. We went to that new dog-friendly place on Newton Street off 14th, Chez S. Very nice place, homecooked-style food (mostly locally grown, courtesy of Star Hollow Farm), and served in a recently redone rowhouse dining room with cheerful orange walls and passably good art and photog on the walls. A bit of a mish-mosh, but what can you do when you want to just chill out and eat with your peeps and dawgs?

The conversation revolved around the air conditioning's condensation pump, which has seen its last days. A repairman had been scheduled for that day and hadn't shown. Now there's lots more water in the basement to worry about. SH wanted to know whether I'd chewed out the repair place for their no-show. I told SH it interfered with my creative mojo to chase down servicepeople, and he just laughed in that special way that seems to say, "Well, it interferes with my creative mojo to have to work a regular day, why don't we change places?"

MS kindly refrained from humming at the table. CS and SS lay at our feet, contented not to have to worry about mojo, creative or otherwise.

Today I'm off to get the car re-registered (I hope) and then wait for the condensation pump. Ohg, and SH has drilled drainage holes in my new planters, so I have that project to look forward to. I am also thinking of getting a new address book, or perhaps making a notebook with blank pages for addresses and calling it, "Address Book."

This has probably been attempted, but perhaps I can give it a fresh approach.

[image by Jenny Holzer]

Poetry Thursday: To Stuart

To Stuart

(after Marvin Bell's "To Dorothy")

You don't love me, exactly.
you love me inexactly.
You let my toad lilies grow
by the air conditioning unit and the
recyclables pile by the door.
And sometimes,
in the ever-more-personal quiet
of our daily nights,
you even tell me it's all right.

You said it yourself, and it seemed true:
"I try to improve things."
But it's not true. Without you,
things would be more than unimproved.
The fans wouldn't turn, nor the kitchen be a "wow."
The air wouldn't move and the tree wouldn't grow.
Someone else would have to hang the shelves.
Without you,
I would have to ask the unanswering
morning
to let me sleep.

DC Birding

A funny thing happened while I was walking the dog last week. I became an urban birder. After all, why be mediocre at only a few things when I can add another activity for which my enthusiasm will always out-distance my abilities?

It happened this way, on a Thursday: we spotted two small boys enthusiastically following a little bird that seemed trapped, unharmed but dazed, on the ground. I got that sinking feeling: something would have to be done, and likely as not whatever human intervention we provided would either do further or harm or no good at all (at best). And all in front of children.

But this story has a happy turn--no endings here.

The bird, a fully fledged sparrow of uncertain age, but definitely young, didn't seem lost or hurt, but was hanging out on the sidewalk near our house, very much in harm's way. I shooed the bird and it hopped only a foot away, then hung around tentatively on the edge of the sidewalk near the dog-beshitted and trash strewn median strip of our humble urban street. It wasn't even near the closest sapling, recently replanted thanks to the ongoing work of Casey Trees and its ReTree DC initiative.

Me, I know nothing about the lives of young sparrows. Though, actually, now that I have fostered one for a few days, I can confidently say that I know next to nothing.

(disclaimer: the web site on starling and sparrow care that I just linked to in my previous paragraph is a marvelous one. It's just that I am a flawed vessel).

I had luck on my side: this was an adolescent bird, not far from its nest even when I transplanted it to my safer garden (mode of transportation a Converse Red shoebox). He stayed in the box all night (we have rats...yeah, it's that kind of neighborhood) and in the morning I felt I could open the lid. By midmorning when I came home from the pet shop with mealworms he was out and about. Today I saw his parents feeding him.

He's decided to stay. He is particularly fond of my lavender bushes. So I managed to do an okay thing after all, maintaining my over-a-lifetime average of, well, being slightly abopve average at most things.

The important part of all this for you, gentle reader, is my discovery of the wonderful A DC Birding Blog and the many, many varieties of sparrow, finch, and other songbirds available to me in my own little 20th-acre of paradise.

And you thought all the preening in DC was on Capitol Hill.

Cobber

We adopted him two weeks ago from the Washington Animal Rescue League.

He's an Australian Shepherd and his name is Aussie slang for "pal."

He housetrained in a week and is now working his way through our collection of bedroom slippers.

A very traditional guy.

He rocks.

And no, it's not too late to donate to WARL's annual Mutts Strut through my secure, guaranteed low-hassle donation page.

(Do not worry, CC, I am still a cat person at heart).

All Souls' Day

The feast of little goblins
is over again. Your own
was a pirate, her small hat
askew. And you
are everywhere
absent, as ever. and I
live without you
just this side
of that door.

A man
in the suburbs
where we went
trick or treating
threw candy from
his second story
window. "Are you
brave? Are you brave?"
He asked
the children.

Of course they said yes.
Of course they couldn't know.

Wordless, I can't
everywhere
wordless
without you.
I never can. Never can
live. I live.

Without you,
a lot of things
make me angry at once.
I can't seem to stay
where I should be, in this
velvet darkness, at the edge
of a safe lawn
on a safe street, waiting
for our daughter to return
with her treats.

When you say you are brave
you get candy. That is still
what we have to believe.