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That Dark Brown Taste
If You Squint...
Little Nippers
Knocked Around
Stepping Lively? Hardly.
Everything Old is New Again
Some Flickers of Interest
Well Spoken
Beached
Tiptoe Through the Living Room
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Cheap Thrills While I Tap My Foot
It became clear the I didn't plan the summer particularly well and my lack of foresight turned into this lousy tug-of-war where I have been fighting constantly for time to work and forgetting deadlines and scrambling in a way that feels much too much like finals week before Winter Break (but with 85 degree weather). This of course combines with Horrible Mother feeling because of course my work angst has been mixed with churlishness. (As an aside, I have to mention that Dahlia Lithwick and Emily Bazelon have an interesting piece about these sort of questions, writ large, and the Republican vice-presidential nominee.)
So it was with some relief that over the long weekend my mother urged me to take the children on a excursion to the recently-opened IKEA in Red Hook. This was a revelation. Not only was I able to replace the hugely embarrassingly tattered pillowcases I had been living with and get a new comforter cover in anticipation of the dog deciding to throw up on it at 4:00 AM. (He's not sick but the summer months mean people discard plum and peach pits on the street and if I'm not super spry and sharp-eyed-- and since I just described how distracted I am, you know how THAT goes-- the terrier will snarf them up and only realize he can't digest them at some quiet moment when everyone is sleeping.)
But the real allure of the new Brooklyn IKEA is not the linen department or the curious children's section (though we also found fabulous kiddie scissors), it is the means by which one gets there. One takes a free water taxi across the East River, leaving from Pier 11 downtown, to the banks of Red Hook. I can't recommend it highly enough for children. They get to see the Statue of Liberty, one of the public art waterfalls pouring away, the odd cruise ship... and the trip is a mere 15 minutes long so you're off before boredom and crank sets in.
But in spite of the pleasures of that excursion, and already I am scheming a return visit, I am wildly ready for school to start again and to be rid of the annoying sense that doing things I need to do (work, for instance) is highly inconvenient for all the people around me.
posted by Elise at 6:37 AM
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Bless your mother, and (again) welcome to the club. No wonder our mothers (and our fathers, for that matter, who -- in my opinion -- don't get enough credit in this maternal-centric world of ours) seemed so crazed when we were young and thought everything revolved around us.
9/03/2008 8:11 PM
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