BC (beloved child the elder) – Page 6

Category: BC (beloved child the elder)

world aids day 2009

Posted on December 1, 2009 by wrekehavoc

(no awful ’80s earworms today. promise.)

today is world AIDS day, a day started in 1988 to bring awareness and education to the plight of those living with HIV and AIDS. years ago, when i worked at the US Dept of Education, i had the privilege of putting together two years’ worth of WORLD AIDS Day commemorations plus helping to develop training materials for fellow employees so that they would understand how to deal with employees who were HIV+/AIDS patients. (in short: treat them as you would want to be treated. you won’t catch the disease from working with people.) i was proud to volunteer the Department’s building to house part of the AIDS Quilt, which was at the time laid out on the National Mall for all to see. while sadly, the quilt has gotten larger, we seem to be learning more about slowing the disease and helping those afflicted live longer.

i know people who have died of complications from AIDS. i also know people who are living with HIV/AIDS.

yesterday, i was talking with my kids about AIDS, which is not easy to do when the kids are 10 and 6. i explained that it stands for acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. BC looked at me a little scared. don’t you have immunodeficiency, mom?

in fact, when i was first diagnosed with CVID, some people thought i had AIDS. i do, honey, i replied, but that’s different from AIDS. the A in AIDS means “acquired” which means doing something to get the virus. i didn’t do anything to get this immunodeficiency; i just was born with these particular genes. and you can’t catch it from me unless you have the same genes, too.

hellboy wasn’t getting this, really, but girlfriend was. and she continued. so what do you have to do to get AIDS? she asked.

well, basically, you can get it from other people’s body fluids.

she crushed up her nose. you mean, like pee?

once again, i am the one with the fun topical conversations, not BS. well, things like blood, for example. before they knew more about HIV, they didn’t know much about the blood supply, so people who were hemophiliacs who got transfusions sadly ended up dying of AIDS.

what are hemophiliacs?

people whose blood doesn’t have the stuff in it to help them stop bleeding. a little cut could kill a hemophiliac if not treated properly.

girlfriend was connecting dots again. you mean, like when you had no platelets and were bruising? she looked sad.

that’s a different problem, and i’m better now. but sort of. (time to divert the attention in order to get her away from the thought of my demise.) anyway, people who share needles when they shoot up their drugs can give it to each other. so don’t do drugs and that’s one problem solved.

ewww! who would do that!!!! she exclaimed.

not anyone with any sense, i said. anyway, another way of getting HIV is… i looked over at the boy, who was probably busy thinking about star wars and continued cautiously…through sex.

girlfriend’s eyes now got HUGE.

we can talk about that part away from your brother right now since i don’t think he understands this the way you do. but know that there are things you can do to keep yourself as healthy as you can be.

girlfriend seemed satisfied with that answer, only stopping to note: mommy, isn’t that guy on EastEnders a guy with AIDS? (we’re so far behind in our episodes here in the US that Mark Fowler is still alive.)

yes, honey. and he still is living like everyone else on the show.

i got a nod from her, and then we moved on.

it’s never easy talking with your kids about AIDS, but i figure if i start early at ages when they can understand and in words that they can comprehend, maybe i’ll help them out somewhere down the road.

then again, maybe somewhere down the road, there will be a cure for this scourge and moms won’t have to have these sorts of conversations.

egregious '80s music: party all the time (eddie murphy)

Posted on November 9, 2009February 9, 2010 by wrekehavoc

ROX-anne…

in the mid-1980s, eddie murphy was hotter than a jalapeno in the desert. riding a wave of popularity from his stint on saturday night live (a stint i adored), murphy was now headlining clubs and starring in wildly popular movies. unlike most actors when asked what they want to do next (answer: direct), murphy decided to tackle the music industry. pulling in superfreak rick james, murphy cut a single in 1985, party all the time.

when i first heard the single, i thought it was a joke.

seriously? he’s singing? man, his voice is so high in a way that screams my circulation is cut off in strategic places. i kept waiting for the jokey part; i remembered him singing in his buckwheat voice, in his roxanne voice… and when he sang kill the white people, well that just nearly made me lose it laughing. so where is the joke in party all the time???

apparently, the joke was on me. it became a hit. and since then, it has actually been covered by other artists.

on the bright side, it became a sort of anthem here when we were parents of kids learning to use the bathroom. suddenly, you could hear me break into song:

my girl wants to potty all the time, potty all the time, potty all the time!

(BC will kill me when she reads this, but she was only two at the time, so get over it, young lady.)

guilty pleasure monday: norwegian wood (beatles)

Posted on October 26, 2009November 17, 2014 by wrekehavoc

please, please, please cut me slack this week.

as i write this, i am trying to make it through perhaps the worst month, or at least one of the very worst months, i have encountered in my short but eventful career as a human. you may recall the start of the month when both my husband and my ceiling collapsed just over 24 hours apart. and yes, i left for san francisco, a story i have yet to finish here.

later that week, i took BC for a tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy, a simple operation with a short healing period everyone said. bring on the ice cream. only, too bad for the girl — she’s probably the only child on the planet who isn’t keen on ice cream, ice pops, or other soft, cold foods. additionally, the pain meds didn’t control her pain, and when they were raised, she threw up. on columbus day afternoon, she ended up visiting the ER to get some IV fluids because she was completely tapped out. when she returned, we thought we were going to turn a corner. and we did.

a bad one.

girlfriend was still not eating or drinking and getting sicker by the day, complete with a fever. anti-nausea meds were not making things any better. by wednesday morning, the ENT on call told me to take her back to the ER and possibly get her admitted to get her back on track. that’s exactly what happened. she and i spent wednesday through saturday noon at fairfax inova, a terrific hospital for pediatrics. we had a few challenges: one morning, we awoke to find the roof leaking onto her IV, so we were moved next door to a room where he child inside was confined because of “droplets” — a sure sign that someone in there had something contagious.

hospitals are important institutions, and i surely am not knocking them in any way, shape or form, as lord knows we have needed them in the past and will one day need them again, perhaps. but a hospital is not a great place to stay healthy.

i can’t be 100 percent certain, but i think that’s where girlfriend and i caught the flu.

when we were released on saturday, i thought the worst was over. girlfriend returned to school on monday. tuesday, i finally got my IVIG, albeit two weeks after i was supposed to get hooked up (i couldn’t schedule it while my poor little girl was recuperating.) tuesday afternoon, i started feeling poorly; at the same time, i received a phone call from the school clinic: come pick up BC. she has a fever of 101.5F.

what????

so girlfriend and i proceeded to spend some more quality time together. we went to her pediatrician’s on wednesday as a follow-up for her hospitalization. the doctor, noting that she still had a fever and was coughing, asked us to start some tamiflu just in case. BC is not yet adept at swallowing pills, so we visited a local old-fashioned pharmacy to get the darn stuff compounded into a liquid. (for you trivia buffs, the actual compounding part? not covered by insurance.) just before noon, she started tamiflu.

and at 1:00? she threw up a little blood.

people had warned me that when the artery/ies behind the tonsils blow, you need to run, not walk, to an ER. halfway there, i pulled over. there’s no more blood, mommy BC pointed out. i called BTD because, after all, he is my Brother The Doctor, who talked me down from the ledge and told me that if it stopped, go home. if the levee breaks, you’d know it.

at 3 am that morning, the levee broke.

girlfriend tugged at my sleeve. mommy, my mouth is full of blood! sure enough, it was extremely clear what was happening. we put on our shoes, i grabbed my purse, and off we rode into the night. i ran red lights, i ran over a median at the hospital, and i parked the car in front of the ER. (thank you, G-d, for the parking space.) the triage nurse took her in pretty speedily — i am, pathetically, an experienced ER patient at virginia hospital center, you know; and this was much faster than when i had almost no platelets left in my body — and next thing you know, we are in a bed in the ER. the doctor talked for a minute and left. i looked at girlfriend. suddenly, she vomited up a tremendous amount of blood, more than i had ever seen in one place that was not in a transfusion or donation bag.

i was terrified! i pulled open the curtain. please help! my daughter is throwing up blood!!

three nurses and the doctor came running to see poor little BC, spewing so much blood that i was terrified that she was going to faint. or worse. off came the clothes. in went the IV (not easily, either.) and soon enough, girlfriend was whisked off to emergency surgery to close things up.

i waited for about an hour until the doctor came out and told me that he’d closed up the leaker. normally, he’d send her home after recovery; but after hearing her recent history, he wanted to keep her for the day to make sure she was on the right track. if she behaved herself, he would send her home around dinner time.

i was frantically calling home on the hospital phone (i left my cell home when i ran out), only to remember that i had brought all the phones upstairs to my room so that ringing would not wake up BS, who desperately needed sleep and who was camping out downstairs. so i just continued to leave messages on his cell and on the home phone voice mail, hoping eventually i’d get a live person. and i did, two hours later. BS came to the hospital at 9, just after he’d gotten jools to school. this was a good thing. this meant that i could finally hit the doctor’s myself, as i was not feeling so great by this time. adrenaline had taken me pretty freaking far, but i didn’t think it was going to last.

because my doctor was booked, i ended up visiting Ye Olde Doc In The Box (aka the urgent care clinic.) lots of people wearing masks and a receptionist telling me that there was already a 90 minute wait were not stellar signs, but this was the only opportunity i was going to get, so i sat and sat with my mask on, trying not to pass out. when the nurse called me in, she noticed my hospital bracelet, the one i got from earlier in the day. when i explained how the day had started, she was pretty startled. nevertheless, she noted, we need to test you for flu.

for the record, having pointy q-tips shoved hard up both nostrils is not pleasant.

long story short: doctor comes in and tells me that i have type A influenza. but hey, i protested, i had the regular flu shot last month!

well then, you probably have swine flu. but they’re both treated the same way, so does it really matter?

with apologies to gertrude stein: tamiflu is tamiflu is tamiflu.

i give the doc props — he actually called up my immunologist to double-check how i should be handled. they both decided that with my track record of bacterial infections, i should rock the zithromax as well.

so basically, BC and i have both been fighting the flu. poor little girl has been fighting it on top of recuperating from not one, but two surgeries. i am praying my husband and son do not get sick or this house of cards will crumble. as you can imagine, my creativity is the least of it at this moment.

so here’s my favorite song of all time. nothing to feel guilty about. completely unfunny, especially since it’s about a guy who burns down a woman’s house because she doesn’t put out. but still an incredibly beautiful song, even when john gets creepy at the end, as he does in this version.

i know i’ll be feeling better soon, everyone will be better soon, and the world will be right again. in the meantime, everyone wash your freaking hands, cover your freaking mouths, and take care of yourselves!!!

san francisco (be sure to wear flowers in your hair) : part one

Posted on October 7, 2009February 9, 2010 by wrekehavoc

it was 1998 when i last went anywhere just as me, myself, and i, rather than as somebody’s wife or mother. this idea gnawed at my soul for a long, long time, until finally, my best bud murph and i figured out that this would be the year we would go away somewhere. since she had moved away, we never got to spend much time together anyway, so why not? besides, murph had some frequent flyer credits to kill, so as long as we selected a place where her plane would take her, we were golden.

we settled on san francisco. san francisco is home to many, many things, some less printable than others. for our purposes, it would be home to the free hardly strictly bluegrass festival in golden gate park. now many of you faithful readers (and i know you are out there, you people besides my dad) are familiar with the fact that i am not exactly the biggest country fan on the face of the earth. this, as we all know, is true. however, i have an appreciation for classics, like emmylou harris, who, i think displays a startling beauty in her work. i also took note of the hardly strictly part of the title. i saw names i adored on the list of performers, like aimee mann and nick lowe. and, in short, i was sold. besides, one of my other dearest friends, m2k, lives there, a lucky strike extra indeed.

now, you might think that that would be that, and i could simply say i got on a plane and off i’d go. but nothing in my life ever goes quite like that. for starters, i am a bit frightened of flying, a la isadora wing. sure, i have flown plenty in my life; i’ve been overseas and i was a regular in the 80s on people express to florida. but somehow, since i’ve become a parent, flying freaks me out. i guess the thought of potentially not being there to see my kids grow up makes me freeze. but i have also learned in life that i have to step up to the plate and just face the things or people i fear and get past them.

so i do.

i was slated to leave on friday, october 2 at 5:15 in order to catch a plane at 6:40 a.m. i packed during the week during fleeting free minutes. by wednesday, i was nearly ready, putting final touches together while BS and jools were out at a cub scout meeting in the evening. they returned home late, 9ish, so i stopped my packing and put jools to bed. then, as he was standing by the sink, rehashing the evening’s events to me while drinking a glass of water, BS suddenly grabbed his throat, then his side, then toppled to the ground, hitting his head on the hard kitchen tile floor. i ran over to him immediately, patting his cheeks and calling his name. no one was home. then, his eyes opened and went back into his head. this is not really happening, i thought. (you bet your life it is, a little voice sang.)

i wedged BS on his side against the dishwasher, jumped up and ran to the phone. only too bad for me (as my heroine junie b would say), that glass of water BS had been holding had spilled all over the floor. i slid and fell on my ass. that hard tile floor contact seared along my legs and backside, but as my ass has plenty of cushion on it, i knew the floor had probably hurt BS’s head a lot more, so i struggled up and grabbed the phone, dialed 911, and slid back to BS, cradling his head in my arm while keeping him on his side.

911 operators, for those of you who have never spoken with them, are rather tough cookies. calm down now, ma’am the lady kept saying to me. i am not one of those people who likes to be told to calm down; it makes me more frantic. but i looked at my husband’s face and knew i had to keep myself together. so i described what had happened, where we were, that sort of thing. as i looked at him, my husband’s eyes opened again, and this time, i saw a glimmer of recognition. i’m fine, he said to me, over and over. i’m fine. i had the feeling that he did not want to trouble the EMTs; that’s the sort of guy he is.

too bad, i thought. i don’t take direction from people who have been unconscious in the past five minutes. the EMTs are coming.

he looked like he was coming to for good; and when i heard the firetruck, i ran to the door to open it, then ran back to my husband. EMTs and firefighters filed in. one took me aside while several hung with BS, asking him all the usual questions to ensure his noggin was still in working order. after lots of questions, the EMTs decided that he probably somehow messed with his vagus nerve and gave himself a brain freeze to remember (or not). he was probably ok for now. fabulous.

i spent the night watching him sleep, as i was afraid whether he’d have a problem again due to whatever happened or perhaps even a concussion from whacking his head on the floor.

the next day, i tried to calm down and finish packing. by the evening, though, i was terrified of the impending flight. i was upset by the idea of leaving my formerly unconscious spouse alone, especially with two kids to look after. in short, i was afraid. i went to bed that night, unable to sleep.

now everyone occasionally hears things that go bump in the night. and, as little miss non-sleeper 2009, i heard two knocks in the night, pounding sounds like when water goes through the upstairs pipes. curious, i thought to myself: no one is running the tub. but i sat there, and i pondered. that is, until i heard the sound to end all sounds.

BOOM!

at around 3 am, a thunderous noise literally pushed my husband and i up into the air (it seemed.) ohmyG-d, ohmyG-d, ohmyG-D! was all i could mutter as i ran down the stairs to find out what the hell had happened. i didn’t have to run far. the ceiling of the living room, AKA the room beneath my bedroom, had fallen. the 60 year old plaster and drywall concoction had finally breathed its last and decided to fall atop a table the kids use to do crafts and play games on. amazingly, all of the toys that were underneath the heavy ceiling were relatively undamaged, though the ceiling did rip a hole in my pullout couch. but no one was injured. (after all, no one else was awake save for insane jane moi.) i checked on the kids, who had no idea what the hell had happened.

and then, i proceeded to stay awake and fret. after all, i had to wake up at 4:15 in order to get myself together for my 5:15 cab. how the hell can i leave you? i shrieked at BS. this is like a sign from G-d — i should not be going anywhere!!! BS told me i should get on that plane and not worry about signs — i needed to go and besides, murph would be very upset with me if i blew her off.

by this point, BC was up for the duration. in between telling me what i needed to wear (you’ll be cold if you don’t wear this jacket, she told me, handing me a windbreaker. she was right, incidentally. glad i listened to the 60 year old in the 10 year old suit.), girlfriend was crying her eyes out. don’t gooooooooooooooo, mommy!!!! oh, i didn’t want to. i really didn’t want to.

but i got in that cab, blew a kiss to the little girl who was sobbing at the window, and was off to the airport.

once there, i stood outside northwest airlines’ entrance. and i sobbed. i called BS. i don’t want to go, i cried. what kind of wife and mother leaves her family after these things have happened?

BS, who by this time was probably one step away from a one-way trip to whothehellami land, very calmly uttered: just GO!

so i did.

guilty pleasure monday: stay awake (mary poppins)

Posted on September 28, 2009February 9, 2010 by wrekehavoc

ah, the magic of The Mouse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPw6QBSggls

those of you who’ve been around here for awhile know i’m pretty ambivalent about disney, disney world, and everything remotely related to walt’s creations. i’ve ranted and ranted and ranted. and ranted yet again about our trips to disney. (and even had some happy moments to share, because like most of their cartoons, disney’s prefab experiences are never black and white.) the kids, however, really enjoy going; so once every so often, we trek down to florida so that we can hear american singing we can spend absurd amounts of cash on items that my kids will begbegbeg for and then probably forget about within one week of our return home we can all have fun as a family in that magical world.

that being said, i do love me some disney movies. sure, there are ones that left me scarred for life (bambi and dumbo, i’m talking about you.) and of course, there’s a certain predictability in their storylines: you know that in the first 20 minutes, something awful is going to happen. but there are degrees of awfulness, i think; and mary poppins never really scared me. i’m thinking julie andrews and dick van dyke singing and dancing all the way through had something to do with that. back then, julie andrews always ended up in a happy ending: hell, only a year later, she escaped the nazis! so a stodgy english banker had nothing on the divine ms. j.

my mother also tells me that when i was being born, the hospital was piping in music. she remembers hearing a lot of chim chim cheree.

anyway, i rediscovered the song stay awake quite by accident. BC had received this baby disney CD as a gift, and she really started to love it. it became a nightly staple; only, too bad for me. the girl didn’t seem to like one song: stay awake. pity, too, because i then found a lovely cover of it by suzanne vega (ignore the grim video), but no dice. see, the song perfectly captured my ambivalence toward nighttime as a mom. on the one hand, i was wiped out: parenthood is exhausting at times, and i wanted girlfriend to conk out so i could get a moment to myself. on the other hand, i enjoyed our time together so much, i didn’t want the day to end.

i guess some things will never change.

flashback: safe and sound

Posted on September 11, 2009February 9, 2010 by wrekehavoc

because i’ll never forget 9/11.

and i suspect you won’t, either.

guilty pleasure monday: frank and ava (suzanne vega)

Posted on August 17, 2009February 10, 2010 by wrekehavoc

frank and ava. embedding is borked, so you have to click here to hear it. bork bork bork.

you know those toys you loved as a child and then tired of? those toys are like the artists you enjoyed in your youth. you still love listening to their hits (or classic albums, if they weren’t exactly a top 40 act) — but have you given them a listen lately? sure, some of them will not be producing great stuff, but you might be surprised at the ones who are.

i feel this way about suzanne vega.

suzanne vega has produced consistently engaging works. she’s so much more than luka (or tom’s diner, which i can’t stand in the smashed-up DNA version) and thank Dog for that. her voice is so clear, so evocative, kind of like a female lou reed but one who actually can sing (with some apologies to reed, who probably could care less.) i cannot understand why she is not more celebrated in the world when she creates the kind of music in league with heavies like aimee mann (at whose altar i worship daily.) some of the imagery in selections from songs in red and grey, an album that is a morose yet wistful product of her divorce, is riveting: she explains to her child:

Daddy’s a dark riddle; Mama’s head’s full of bees. You are my little kite, carried away in the wayward breeze.

i was glad that her next release, beauty & crime, moved away from that topic. frank and ava, she once noted, is the story of a couple who can’t live together and who can’t live apart. in the end, like the real frank and ava, they end their relationship and never see each other again, though they never forget each other. it is a song with an incredible hook; i’m surprised it wasn’t snapped up for use in a movie or starbucks or SOMEWHERE.

we love this song. my little cherubs sing knowingly it’s not enough to be in love. i wonder whether they will really understand that later on in life. i guess i’ll have to content myself with a different image for now: the image of BC, who, in the proud tradition of her grandmother, mangles the lyrics to the song. unintentionally. for girlfriend, the song starts out this way:

on the way to the bidet is where the trouble used to start.

(well, for people of a certain age, this could be a problem, right?)

anyway, maybe suzanne vega doesn’t light your lucky as she does mine (musically speaking), but perhaps you should check out someone you liked years ago. their latest stuff may not put them in heavy rotation on the radio (especially if you live in radio wasteland as i do), but it might merit heavy rotation on an mp3 player near you.

guilty pleasure monday: sneakin' sally through the alley (robert palmer)

Posted on August 10, 2009February 10, 2010 by wrekehavoc

anyone else notice a leitmotif here in the guilty pleasure monday world?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsLz2pvO5N0

yes, those of you observant enough (or even breathing, perhaps) might notice i’m picking GPMs featuring a lady’s name. although the lady in this song is clearly no lady.

and she sure as hell ain’t the singer’s wife.

you can’t talk about this song, a cover of new orleans legend allen toussaint’s, without mentioning the late, great lowell george of little feat. i remember the first time i heard the sailin’ shoes / hey julia / sneakin’ sally through the alley montage and thinking — wait a minute — is palmer covering a little feat tune? i had heard the little feat version of sailin’ shoes, but not palmer’s. george backs palmer on this album, and i think it shows.

so many people think of robert palmer as the slicked out, tricked out guy of the 80s with that annoying all-girl band.

(yeah. i’ll wait while the guys out there finish with the video…)

anyway, long before the creepy whiteface models (TM), a predecessor to the blue man group (sans tobias fünke), palmer was a purveyor of blue-eyed soul, as those crazy, cliche-ridden music writers like to call it. teamed up with george, he made a classic album filled with slide guitars and funky beats. my kids have been listening to this since they were, well, even littler, as it is never too early to experience the greats. sure, the lyrics aren’t exactly kid-friendly (there’s a lady in a turban in a cocaine tree and she does a dance so rhythmically. hello, division of youth and family services?) but hell, like me, they’re paying most of their attention to the groove.

the only problem occurred when BC, age 3 or 4, started singing hey julia to her little friend, named, not surprisingly, julia.

Hey, hey Julia, you’re acting so peculiar
I know I’d never fool you in a million years
A horn section you resemble and your figure makes me tremble
And I sure would like to handle whats between your ears

yes, i remember the day when girlfriend asked me about that last line. i think i told her the singer was talking about the woman’s brains, like in a horror movie. she accepted that, and we moved on. (i expect a bill from her therapist in about 20 years.)

so this threesome of songs (and don’t think that term won’t get me saddled with all sorts of perverted page hits now) goes from drugs to sex to getting caught. we don’t really get to know much about sally, beyond her generosity and her clandestine trips through the alley. but what we do learn? the sheer stupidity of the man telling the tale of woe. why, there’s nothing wrong with being friends, he tells his wife — sometimes, this chick lets me use her car!

i’ll say.

guilty pleasure monday: if you were here (thompson twins)

Posted on July 20, 2009February 10, 2010 by wrekehavoc

because jake ryan is a bohunk.

my dear friend from college, suzanne has been visiting this weekend. we had fun on saturday when we took BC to the mall to just shop and cruise around, much like we did in our younger days. BC really loved hitting the mall with us older ladies; she gave great feedback as i was trying things on. for example:

mom, that dress looks like the one i tried on when we visited colonial williamsburg.

and

mom, this dress is all wrong for you. it makes your butt look bigger.

and

mom, you need to wear your pants lower, like i do.

yep. in one hop, skip, and jump, we will be landing in that scaryland known as puberty.

(i’ve seen the future. i can’t afford it.)

one of the funniest things suz, BC, and i realized was that the merchants at the mall were all piping in 80’s music. we heard yaz, we heard depeche mode (or that peshy thing, as my mom used to call them). hell, even BC looked up at me, puzzled, when she was spraying her tenth bottle of whatever at bath and body works — mom, they’re playing lips like sugar!?

yes, virginia, i am now the targeted demographic.

now that i’m a targeted demographic, i am feeling just a tad bit maudlin. i am looking back. and little screams 80s more than the collected works of john hughes. in fact, i really still wish i could host a john hughes film festival — at least, of the three or four flicks of his that i can stand to see multiple times.

one of them, of course, is the classic sixteen candles. molly ringwald was hughes’ muse (heh — say hughes’ muse ten times fast!), and this movie is probably the very best of the entire bunch. no movie captures the awkward teen years better than this — or at least, funnier than this one. the writing is top-notch.

and my favorite part, of course, is the end, when jake ryan is helping samantha baker blow out her birthday candles. i’m not entirely sure why hughes chose if you were here for that moment; the lyrics don’t exactly work. but musically, when you hear the swells behind this innocent scene, it just hits you in the gut.

and you can no longer hear this song without getting a little wistful. which is where i am at the moment.

wistful for a time when i was a different sort of demographic.

peace train

Posted on July 1, 2009February 11, 2010 by wrekehavoc

both BC and hellboy have started camp this week. so far, the only casualty involved would be hellboy’s swim trunks and rash guard, which he lost the very first day and which are not present in any of the lost and found bins. i’ll chalk it up to his inexperience and try to not fret, considering he was growing out of that set anyway.

hellboy lucked out. his best girlfriend from kindergarten, M, is in his group at camp. on the first day, i hid behind a tree, stalker-helicopter mom that i am, watching the group get organized. hellboy had a deathgrip on M’s hand, which another little girl didn’t like very much. the other little girl, who i found out later was M’s friend from preschool, was very much interested in tearing this couple asunder. ultimately, though, they’ve all apparently settled their differences. besides, hellboy has made friends with one very nice-sounding little boy and another little boy, who curiously started out their friendship by kicking hellboy in the nuts while in the post-pool shower portion of the day. (i have had friendships start in even odder ways, so i guess i will take a deep breath and see where this one goes.)

madame, as is typical, knew no one in her group when she started. [how wonderful for the moms (and dads!) who get themselves organized enough in january to get their kids together with other children at camp. this was not a year like that in this house.] fortunately, you could drop BC in a crowd of millions and she would make a life-long friend (if not several) by day’s end. (this of course would be thanks to my gene pool contributions.) so i don’t usually worry about BC in new situations. she goes through the same motions i do — she frets that she knows no one, then she just finds someone who looks like they could do with a friend, and voila! instant social scene.

this year, BC has already made her friend for the session. per usual, i asked BC which local school her new friend A is from. mommy, she replied, A is from saudi arabia. we have lots and lots of people from all over the world in these here parts, so i figured, sure, she’s from there, but where does she live now?

she lives in saudi arabia, girlfriend replied, getting irritated. her family is here for the summer and they sent her to camp.

alrighty. well, that’s got to be interesting, huh? has she told you anything about saudi arabia? i asked.

yes, she was born in philadelphia, but her family is from saudi arabia. that makes her american because she was born here, right?

i replied, yep. how lovely — you might make a new penpal, i replied, hopefully. where is this going?

she’s muslim. i helped her out today and told her that she shouldn’t eat the pepperoni on the pizza they gave us for lunch. she can’t eat pork, either, but i don’t think she knew what pepperoni was. so i helped her. i remembered DiDi (BC’s beloved friend from daycare, who is really named kareem and who is apparently still the man she wants to marry) can’t eat pork because he’s muslim. so i figured she couldn’t, either.

i scratched my head a little. my parents never had to navigate these sorts of situations. well, that’s a mitzvah that you helped her keep with her beliefs, honey. and besides, her beliefs aren’t that much different than yours are. does she know you’re jewish?

sure, BC replied, i told her. but she doesn’t know what jewish means.

should i chalk it up to youth? should i chalk it up to purposeful omission? i don’t know. but i believe that peace happens, one person at a time. i have to be positive and hopeful and not make assumptions, not jump to any stupid or misguided conclusions. because peace no longer just starts with me.

it starts with my kids.