Very advanced.

My beautiful nephews are two years old and three months old. I was in the other room when baby Miles wailed sharply and then Isaac started to cry. I came in to find my sister comforting Miles and Isaac coming to me to be held. I scooped him up and asked him what happened. He choked back sobs and said "Miles got hurt." My mom skills are not fully developed, so I was still wondering why Isaac was crying when my sister said "Nice use of the passive voice there, bud."

At only two! Using the passive voice properly! To denote an agentless accident that somehow ended in his baby brother crying! To obscure the subject, who might otherwise be confused for a little boy in the very same room! Nicely done, sweet Isaac. Your grandfather will be so proud.

See you Monday.

When my sister and I were very little, my Dad used to put us to bed. Every night he would tuck us in, get himself comfortable, then ask us the same question to start our ritual. "OK beautiful girls, what are the nine parts of speech?” My sister and I would list them all, maybe struggling to remember interjections or conjunctions. Then he would ask us which one we wanted to hear about tonight. That was a huge question. The wrong answer would get us a short story and quick bedtime. Articles were worthless; Daddy would kiss us right after “a, an, and the” and that was all we got. Interjections were fun but short.

Verbs were good if you wanted a long, exciting story with lots of action. You could always extend the story by asking about other tenses or adverbs. Nouns started out easy, with “person, place or thing”, but there were choices to make after that, like concrete or abstract. When Daddy was in a good mood, he would go through adjectives too.

The absolute, hands-down best were the pronouns. Pronouns were so great that you couldn’t waste them by hearing them every night. You saved them up to end a really good day. We could all talk about I, and you, and he, she, it and point to the right person or stuffed animal as we said each. Those were naturally followed by their parallels, me and you and him, her, it. Pronouns ended with our favorite of all time, the Monster Pronouns. We would summon the Monster Pronouns together: This! That! These! Those!, then go to sleep happy, knowing they would guard our dreams.

I’ll be hanging out with my nephews the next couple days. They might be too young for the nine parts of speech, but they are very advanced. I could whisper the Monster Pronouns to them as they go down for naptime.

End of an era.

I can’t dare my baby brother to do things any more. Last year he put his hand in the maggots and licked the sand crab for a dollar (each). He wasn’t going to jump in the unheated pool for a dollar at Christmas, but his mom kicked in another two dollars and that was enough. I really think he would have picked up the road kill for a dollar this morning.

I am NOT the one who taught them "I smell bacon".

My half sister and brother were born when I was in college, which means they’ll be always be babies to me. I was appalled when my sister was about to start middle school. I went to a junior high, seventh through ninth grade. I didn’t want her to start a new school in sixth grade; that’s just too little.

So the summer before she started middle school I pulled her aside. “Baby girl,” I asked, “do you want to go to sixth grade next year, or do you want us to run from the law?” I told her I wasn’t entirely sure what running from the law would be like, but it would probably involve gritty motels in the Southwest and drinking coffee in diners. Then we went out to the driveway to practice. I would shout “cop”, and she would duck under the dashboard. We called each other aliases, like “Meggie” for Megan, and “Beautiful” or “Perfect” for her.

She decided not to run from the law after all. Her friends were going to middle school and she thought she was ready. She was; she handled it gracefully. However, next year she goes to high school. This time, she says she wants to run from the law for a year. I told her I would pick her up in August. The timing is good. I’ll have worked for more than a year, which is a nice thing to be able to add to your résumé. And my car is about to die, which I think is another requirement of running from the law. I’m looking forward to it.


I’ll be in LA this weekend to see them. I can’t wait. I’ve been missing them a lot. See you Monday!

And we need a lead singer.

The show I went to on Monday night was David Grisman, playing the mandolin with his jazz quintet. I should keep quiet and let you assume that I am a terribly cultured person who goes to jazz quintets all the time. But it was Roxie who told me David Grisman was playing, and I mostly went because I mistakenly thought it would be bluegrass.

I was raised on bluegrass and old-timey gospel music. My Dad was a college radio DJ during the folk revolution and loved bluegrass ever after. It was what my parents played around the house, both on the stereo and my Dad’s mandolin. By the time I got to high school I had found KROQ, but growing up I thought it was normal for nominally Jewish kids living in Los Angeles to know hundreds of Baptist hymns.

No one was more surprised than I was when O Brother became popular. I had gone way into the closet with my tastes in bluegrass music. In college, if I was homesick I might listen quietly behind closed doors, but before that movie came out my friends had zero patience for bluegrass. I still don’t expect other people to be fans, so I was thrilled to find out that lots of the crowd from Ultimate were going to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass last year.

It was during Dolly Parton’s great, great show that we decided to form a bluegrass band. My Dad gave me a mandolin, which I keep meaning to learn to play. Rox and Barb would learn to play dueling banjos. I forget all the other instruments and people, but everyone loved the idea. By the time we stopped mentioning it to people, the band had at least fourteen or fifteen people, some playing instruments that aren’t really part of a strict bluegrass tradition.

I’ve been worried about our band for months now. When we first thought of it, we all figured that we would each learn to play our instruments, practice a few songs together, and then perform in Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2006. That seemed like an awfully high first step to me; I thought we should do some gigs first. Nothing could be more natural than for us to perform at the spring league party in June.

I realized we should perform at the spring league party back in December, and even then I thought the timing was awfully tight. There is just so much for a band to do before their first gig. At the very least we should learn to play instruments and practice in a garage. I thought we would just cover the usual four or five bluegrass songs, but Roxie tells me that we have too much integrity for that and we will perform our original pieces. I just want to know who is supposed to be writing those songs when no one is even working on the basics. By now I think we should be fighting amongst ourselves, sleeping amongst ourselves, talking about how to spend all the money we’re gonna have when the record company comes through and developing drug problems. We are desperately behind.

I refuse to call the first band meeting because I am already in charge of too much stuff. Someone else will have to take the initiative. I am sorry that the date for our first performance keeps slipping, because I am pretty sure that groupies don’t throw panties at you until after you have done a show. I am also sorry that the world is being denied a chance to hear our music. But I am not sorry enough to take on the job of managing all these irresponsible musicians.

My 0-2 record

I have had two premonitions in my life. Both of them felt like a sonic boom or standing too close to an air raid siren; it was like having something intangible shake you all the way through. The first time was years ago in LA. I was with my sister and her boyfriend and my friend Teddy. We were walking back from a show and we dropped my sister off at their car. They were leaving for a trip to Italy the next day, so we wished them a good time. As they pulled away, I knew with absolute certainty that they were going to die on that trip and I would never see her again. It was horrible.

I told Teddy right away, who calmly made all of the obvious points. My beautiful sister was healthy and resourceful, in good company, going to a safe, lovely country, and would have a great time before she came home in two weeks. That’s what I thought too, except for knowing that I would never see her again.

The second premonition was almost a year ago. I was reading some guy’s blog when it came to me that I was going to marry him. It wasn’t like ‘he is so totally my husband and he’s going to marry me and we’ll have beautiful babies’. I just knew without a doubt that my life was going to change, because he was going to be my husband. I remember hoping that he was a nice person.

Neither premonition came true. I was disproportionately relieved when my sister came home safe and happy. Months later, I met the guy from the blog. He was certainly nice enough and I enjoyed chatting with him. But the part about our getting married didn’t come up. (My friends say I should have brought it up, in a crazy stalker way. That would have been fun, but he hadn’t done anything to deserve crazy stalker drama.)

I hope I am out of the premonition business. Knowing that they don’t come true doesn’t completely cancel out the certainty they bring. I have to say that I am happy with the outcome -- I would rather they were both wrong than both right. Losing my sister would be unbearable. Splitting the two premonitions is a dangerous game; I would rather not play at all.

Rest in peace, Grandma Jeanette.

It is a measure of my deep love for Chris that I hauled my recently broken, recently sick self out to help him move for four hours in the rain tonight. It was especially hard to have to box and move his crap, since I just spent four days in Connecticut with my dad and aunt working ten-hour days to clear out my grandmother’s final apartment. Still, if there is anyone who can call on my time and effort, it is Chris. Chris has done some heavy lifting for me this last year.

I call on Chris first when things go wrong, and I’ve had some losses in the past months. When I heard my grandmother died, I had no hesitation about calling him out of his meeting to come over and take care of me. She wasn’t a nice person; honestly, we dreaded seeing her. It was no coincidence that her daughter put an ocean between them to the east and her son moved west until an ocean stopped him. She hadn’t been in her right mind for four or five years now, which took some of the guilt out of avoiding her.

Chris came over right away so we could talk about my grandma’s death. I can’t say that I felt grief. She could be horrible to be around and I hadn’t wanted to know her. Her death certainly didn’t open a wound in my heart. But that night I felt terribly sad for her life. The heartbreaking part of my grandmother’s nastiness is that she never meant to drive anyone away. She liked being around people and she loved her family very much. She never connected her poisonous comments and relentless nagging with her desperate loneliness; it was a mystery and great sadness to her that we didn’t visit or write. As we cleared out her apartment this week, I found hundreds of envelopes and stacks of stationary and cards. She would have loved to have a correspondence with me.

My decision to not be like my grandmother is one of the most powerful choices I have ever made. But the night of her death, I wanted to sort through her characteristics, to see if there was anything I could claim and keep. I found a couple – her strong will and determination has served me well. In an odd gift, she bequeathed to all of her grandchildren an unusually high pain tolerance. Chris sat with me as I cried for her loneliness and looked more closely at her than I had for years.

I wasn’t purely sad, so we were also joking. At one point I wondered aloud what would happen to all her spite. Now that it wasn’t contained in her body, was the world big enough to hold it? Chris corrected me instantly. No, he said. That’s not how it works. When someone dies, all the love they contain is released back to the world. The spite dies with them. “Look at you,” he said. “You haven’t showed this much compassion for your grandma since I’ve known you.”

I thought about that idea for several days and I am sure it is true. It isn’t the love each person generates; that is given away during their lifetimes. But the love people felt for them gets carried in their selves their entire lives. When their selves are gone, that love is freed for the living to feel again.

Valuable lessons all around.

I went to Ukiah with the rest of engineering girl gang, a nice biologist and an older engineer. Don't remember how it came up, but I started telling the story about my sister and my dad and her teddy bear. My sister's favorite bear was George, and one night while we were all at dinner, my dad mentioned that a quarter a day would go a long way toward making sure that nothing bad happened to George while my sister was at school. Accidents happen, he said, but for a quarter a day he would personally check on George when he came home from lunch. My sister held out at first, but after finding George hanging by his neck from the ceiling, or in the oven, or the freezer, she conceded that George was indeed accident prone and started paying the protection money.

Her allowance didn't always last the entire week, but she could always earn some extra quarters by ironing dad's shirts. He paid her a quarter a shirt, which goes to show that he had a system the entire time and wasn't just extorting money from a ten-year-old girl for the fun of it. We were all laughing as Tracy asked how my dad could be so mean, and I answered that, well, he just wanted to teach her a life lesson in paying protection money on time, and how important a quarter could be.

"Why?" said the older engineer. "Is he a Jew?"

All the laughing stopped and I thought the sunlight seemed a little whiter and bleaker for a flash and none of us had anything to say until I answered "Yes. He is Jewish. As am I." The older engineer faltered, and explained that she didn't mean anything by it, its just that you know how important money is to Jews. Well, we were walking somewhere anyway and I didn't care to walk near her anymore, or really have anything to say to her after that. I still don't.

Two things about that comment shocked me. First, we are stateworkers! Are we not trained to be painfully, exasperatingly sensitive and correct? (Although considering that the girl gang spends its working hours in a nearly non-stop exchange of sexist comments and overt sexual harassment, perhaps the training has not taken hold as well as our bosses might hope.) How did "Jews love money" slip through? If it got back to our big boss, which it won't by me, all hell will break loose for her.

Second, I was surprised by how much the comment hurt. How much is not very much in the big scheme of things, but enough to have some sting a couple days later. I almost never identify with my Jewish heritage, and I have been a privileged part of mainstream culture my entire life. I may have to re-think some of my earlier reasoning (like "the etymology of 'call a spade a spade' is about shovels and not racism, so save your ire for real crap, otherwise impressive Councilwoman Hammond" in favor of "our history is so heavily loaded that it hurts either way, so how about we use words that have no opportunity for misinterpretation."). Thinking hurts my pretty little head, and what a pain in the ass to have to do it twice. But it is worth the effort if it saves me from accidentally making someone else feel like that.

Bea, Freddy, Charles and Jane

My grandma was the oldest of four. She was my nice grandma and I miss her still. She was smarter than she ever got to fully use, an unusually skilled knitter, kind, observant and optimistic. She told my Mom that she worried I was so generous I would give my whole self away. Most of the time I look like the other side of my family, but I see her sometimes when I am putting on lipstick.

My (great) Uncle Freddy is a charmer. He flirts incessantly. I would like to know him better, but his rake persona is so ingrained that I can't turn the conversation to anything more interesting. The best thing he ever did was marry my Aunt Betty.

The scandal of this weekend is that at age 85, my Uncle Charles has left his third wife. Got on his motorcycle after a fight and stormed off. No one has heard from him for a couple weeks, and they don't expect to until he turns up with his next woman. Wouldn't you hope that there is an age where you can stop worrying about your husband taking off for another woman? Surely, at some age, he doesn't want the freedom and grit of seedy motels in Florida? Well, ladies, perhaps you can be secure sometime after he turns eighty-five. But Charles has done this his whole life, and he's not done yet.*

My grandmother's sister, Aunt Naney, was married to Jack until my grandma and grandpa had them over for family dinner. By all accounts, Jack took one look at my grandfather's sister, and that was the end of Naney and Jack's marriage. Jack and my grandpa's sister were married until he died in her arms decades later. My Mom always called him Uncle Uncle Jack.

Uncle Uncle Jack left Aunt Jane with a little daughter and not much else. During WWII my grandma was raising my Mom, so she and Aunt Naney, with their two little girls, got an apartment together in downtown Bloomington. I have always thought those were good years for them; I know they had enough money left over to go get an ice cream sundae a couple times a week. I don't believe in an afterlife, but I would love to think they are together now, sharing a sundae and shaking their heads over Charles.

*I changed this one.

For you, baby? Scalding hot.

I was sitting with my little brother on my lap. He’s ten now, so he isn’t going to put up with that for much longer, but he’s a great kid and I’ll take it for as long as I can. I asked him what I ask anyone who sits on my lap. “So, are you a good boy?” He said he was, and I asked him what he wanted for Christmas. He didn’t come up with anything, so I prompted him.

“Would you like a cheerleader outfit with pom poms?”

He said he wouldn’t.

“How about an adorable pony?”

Nope. Not a pony.

“I know! I bet you want a really hard math book.”

Oddly, he didn’t want a really hard math book.

“For Christmas, would you like to do extra chores around the house? I can talk to Daddy…”

No, he didn’t want extra chores around the house.

I gave up. This was ridiculous. I teased him some about not getting him anything for Christmas if he was going to be so difficult about it. Then I hugged him and apologized for giving him a hard time. And he said “Well, it’s better than what you said you would get me for my birthday.” I didn’t remember, so I asked him what I said I would get him for his birthday. He said, “really hot water.”

“I told you I would give you hot water for your birthday?”

“Really hot water. Hot as I wanted it.”

“I said I would get you really hot water for your birthday?” “Yep.” “You’re sure?” “Yep. Really hot water.”

I can sort of reconstruct the context for that*, but most of me just thinks 'Jesus. What kind of horrible person tells her baby brother she’s giving him really hot water for his birthday?' I don’t know if it is better or worse that I didn’t even follow through on my offer.


*He got a trebuchet for his birthday. We were probably talking about sieging castles. From there, I think we talked about pouring boiling oil on the other army, and I suggested he needed boiling oil. Then I probably thought boiling oil would be hard to clean up, and offered him really hot water instead.