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Memory Lane: Soup Burg R.I.P.
It is a mistake to think that New York is all about the latest and greatest when you can just as easily stumble over colonial houses and African Burial Grounds, secret speakeasy entrances and abandoned subway substations. Burbling history makes New York something fantastic, and when you combine it with growing up in the city, one can relish- or become swamped in- all kinds of levels of fantastic nostalgia and it's great to be able to indulge in this kind of sentimental waxing.
Chronic nostalgia is why love the Landmarks Commission and why I write angry letters about buildings that threaten my neighborhood and sign petitions to keep Donald Trump from building something horrible in Soho and why I cheer when fancy-pants folks get told that they can't pave over the cobblestones in front of their building.
Early this morning, I learned that a restaurant is closing. Today. It isn't a wildly remarkable place, and there used to be zillions exactly like it. In fact, there is another branch of this joint a few blocks away from the original, but to me there is only one Soup Burg. Since it has been in business for 57 years, I suspect I am not alone.
Soup Burg taught me the finer points of diner coffee (hot and iced) when I was in high school. I worked at a children's' clothing store (long since closed) two blocks away and it was my late morning, early afternoon breather. It is (was) a quintessential place. A defining place. If you need to describe a Greek diner to an outsider, there it is. If you need to picture a burger deluxe or a grill counter, look no further. It is a spot that- in spite of being smack in the middle of one of the tonier parts of Madison Avenue- never bothered to reinvent its menu for dieters. Their idea of diet food is that classic 70's gambit: a scoop of cottage cheese instead of a hamburger bun and Jell-o for dessert.
In spite of the heat, my husband and I took Felix on a pilgrimage and crammed ourselves into a corner where we photographed ourselves in this dying breed of a restaurant. (I was unable to show Felix the pleasures of the 2nd Avenue Deli's pickles before it lost its lease, so I felt the need to indoctrinate him into this place that contributed to his mother's odd palate.) Some people beside us seemed amused but cranky. She had a headache which we were able to help because I never leave the house without at least two forms of painkiller and once the ice was broken, she asked: "Is the food here really good?"
Soup Burg's last day was their first time!
My husband explained that it isn't really about the food, which is good in a bad way or bad in a good way. It was about our pasts and how much we love knowing that Soup Burg was always there.
This is one of the things that makes growing up in New York so wonderful. Your life tends to linger all over town (at least until rents get too high), which makes the whole city your scrapbook.
And where else can you find restaurants with this kind of signage over the cook counter?
posted by Elise at 4:36 PM
2 Comments
Not So Much Dog Eat Dog
There's a lot of toughness floating around these days. No one is supposed to complain about anything (which doesn't really interrupt laments, it just makes the ranters feel guilty and compromised). If mothers stay at home and feel bored, they're accused of being lazy and spoiled, of defeating the feminist cause. If they have trouble handling work and motherhood they're told that they should be glad they have jobs and to stop being such idiots. If they get stretch marks, it's their fault for not exercising enough, or exercising too much, or failing to use the correct moisturizer. Everything is so fraught that introducing a simple petulant protest about anything is enough to bring down scads of people railing at one for having bad politics and questionable morals.
So it was with some relief that yesterday afternoon I got to observe a truly sympathetic society up at the Bronx Zoo where the African Wild Dogs (Lycaon pictus to you species name lovers) were cavorting.
They're wonderful to watch, even if you're not dog-obsessed and have a truly complicated but startlingly un-harsh style of pack behavior. If one gets sick, the other dogs feed it and take care of it until it either recovers or dies. When a litter of pups is born, the rest of the pack chips in with babysitting and general care (since litters can contain up to 21 pups there is certainly something practical going on). No one gets to hog food. Everyone eats at once without fighting. It all seems terribly reasonable and natural. I'm not wild about the idea of having to bite my dinner to death after chasing it for a few hours but it is nice in this moment where we are constantly being yapped at about how the individual should take care of himself and how we are responsible for our destinies, blah, blah... that organic communities actually work out just fine.
But there is a shadow over all things, and these little carnivorous utopian societies are now completely endangered.
Still, if you can take a look at them, it's quite a treat. Word to the wise: Wild African Dogs are crepuscular- most active at dawn and dusk- so for maximum frolicking, visit in the late afternoon. Until then, watch the Bronx Zoo video.
posted by Elise at 10:11 AM
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Looks
I have tried to resist talking about this but I have been privy to so much chatter about the new blog: Shape of a Mother that it is hard not to have an opinion. And why bite my tongue?
So the site, if you haven't lingered there already, encourages women to send in anonymous pictures of themselves, during and after pregnancy. The goal is to create a forum in which women can see the effects pregnancy has on the bodies of other women, feel comforted about the changes that have happened in themselves and just indulge an interest, a curiosity, a fear. . . you name it.
And there has been considerable comment on the images. Lori Leibovich (founder of Indiebride) wrote favorably about the site on Salon, seeing it as forum for women celebrate themselves and feel less shame about their bodies. Clearly, given how many people have submitted pictures, and how much press the site has gotten, this is a powerful idea that really does give women an outlet.
I'm not sure about it, though. Salon's letters quickly snarled up into a knot of self-righteousness, debating about whether stretch marks are badges of honor or signs of incredible indolence, whether American women put on too much weight during pregnancy, whether people should get pregnant at all given the horrors that beset the knocked up body.
Over the weekend, I caught a fragment of conversation (before I had to catch the Felix who was threatening to tumble down some steps) in which someone declared the site completely terrifying, making her more frightened than ever of what it means to be pregnant.
And so here's my problem. You don't really know the before and after. It is easy to generalize that "this is what happens when someone gets pregnant and it is nightmarish," because it is hard to keep in mind that the images are donated from a self-selected group of people who are willing to put themselves on display. As a result, these pictures tend to be extreme: people who look fabulous and people whose bodies can be scary- particularly to someone contemplating the unknown.
The thing is, being pregnant is weird. It is interesting and frightening being a participant in this internal science project. I always loved David Cronenberg's movies but all through my pregnancy I kept remembering the central plot point of Scanners. All of the monster-types are people who were born with a genetic mutation as a result of their mothers having taken a drug while they were pregnant. The drug ("Ephemerol") was a tranquilizer prescribed to make women feel more comfortable with the unnerving knowledge that a whole person is growing inside them.
Anyway, this is all to say that I don't need to look at anyone else to feel frightened or inadequate when it comes to my body- pregnant or not. I am not a pregnancy sentimentalist. I didn't let my doctors tell me how much I weighed- ever. There are extremely few pictures of me from those 40 weeks, just a couple from the baby shower with me in black, hunching on a dark couch and one other with the dog on top of my belly. Step aside, nothing to see here.
Shape of a Mother is obviously interested in appearances, but regardless of the philosophy behind the site, it is impossible to get around the fact that those women's images are as easy to criticize as they are to admire.
Pregnancy, while obvious, is private and all of these physical changes are also private things. The people who have submitted to Shape of a Woman have been gracious enough to let us see what happened, but their experience really has no bearing on me, or you, or anyone.
It's always going to be a mystery.
posted by Elise at 7:29 PM
1 Comments
Flickers of Interest
The early hours revealed a couple of interesting articles, one on the idea that preschool is actually more than just a frivolity and the other about the search for the origins of and a cure for preeclampsia.
I have only seen one episode of the television show ER and by complete coincidence, it is the episode that sent zillions of pregnant women into panics because the main storyline involved a patient who dies of preeclampsia (and the guy who played her husband later turned up as Josh on the West Wing). I understand that episode was pulled from syndication for a while because of how upset people got. Since then I have known people who suffered from it and some who have lingering health issues. I do hope this article is the beginning of solutions.
And about preschoool, what can I say? My ear is to the ground.
posted by Elise at 12:44 PM
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Cast Away
Infants are so self-contained that, in spite of all cautions to the contrary, Toddler Summer comes as a shock. Everything starts getting catapulted out of the stroller and people begin to trot after you, waving discarded shoes and beverages that you failed to notice because you were trying to stop the cascade of cereal that gets pitched overboard in a Hansel-esque gesture. (Folly, because the dog, who is usually in your company anyway is doing his best to digest the trail that would lead home.)
And what of the poor shoes and cups that don't get noticed?
They become the Orphans of Summer.
posted by Elise at 3:25 PM
1 Comments
The Savage Mythology of Urban Parents
Selfish showy monsters or just so many fish in a 321 square mile barrel?
At first I was reluctant to read this week's splashy New York Magazine cover story "The Mommy Diaries," which talks about the web site UrbanBaby and how its odd message boards read like, well, some sort of collective journal for maternal angst, complaint, tragedy, nastiness and indecision.
Unless, of course, very little of it is true.
I only say this because at various times while I was pregnant and then when Felix was new and confusing, and now when school looms, I have gone over to UrbanBaby looking for information and found. . . something messy, unhelpful and not at all fun or interesting or funny or addictive. I mean, yes, there is entertainment in people's nastiness, nothing there that can't be satisfied by watching The Women or reading The Group. All of the hand wringing on the boards just seems like stuff that came out of a can.
Still, it is good that it's being talked about in long magazine pieces because otherwise people might forget that they're supposed to think New York City parents (read: mothers) are insane. (Though I have to say that UrbanBaby is doing everything it can to perpetuate this notion. The depressing Nightline "Cutthroat Preschool Wars" two-part program was produced with UrbanBaby's participation.)
And then the New York Observer shows up this week with a big ugly piece about how people (read: mothers) in New York are obsessed with sex selection and willing to shell out tons of money to have the kind of child they want. The piece is really nasty, though the Observer does have a talent for finding ridiculous people and getting them to say the most silly, self-incriminating things. (One Ms. Thompson really wanted a girl: "It was an obsession... Especially as friends and family members were having little girls, it was just hard for me to not be able to shop in the girls' section of the store for my own children.")
Is this really a local phenomenon or is it just another "showcase" article, suggesting that New Yorkers are more crazed, more spoiled, more demanding, more immoral (and that's certainly what I see between all these lines) than everyone else?
But I should point out that even this snarkiest of articles mentions that many of the sex selection clinics in the United States have only recently reached into New York. They started on the West Coast. Gotham is late to this party.
If it makes everyone else feel good, I suppose New York City parents are performing some sort of service in allowing the rest of the country to feel superior.
posted by Elise at 11:33 AM
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Summer School
There's little I can actually do about this preschool panic that's so much in the air these days. But the Fear is everywhere.
A while ago, Nightline (ABC's news magazine) aired a kind of scare-mongering two-part story called "Inside the Cutthroat Preschool Wars," which managed to make each parent interviewed seem craven and eccentric. The one school official who consented to be interviewed was clearly miserable and hated being put on the spot with questions of this sort: "So do you mean to tell me that if someone writes a check for $1,000,000 you don't admit his kid?" One wonders why the institution thought it would be a good idea to put someone on this show in the first place. In a different part of the segment, some lunatic woman who supposedly facilitates school admissions (by accepting enormous sums of money) comes off as a nasty, crazed, poorly informed harridan in an ugly sweater set... (Even I know that some of the things she was spouting aren't even half true.)
I figure the show served its curious purpose, which was to make people who have young children and who live in New York City feel embarrassed and pathetic and further convince the rest of the country that New York City is some kind of insane parallel universe. And that's always good for a laugh.
The media has been pretty successful, since someone who doesn't have children told me recently that she feels hopeless about the prospect of getting her not-yet-conceived kid(s) into school.
As for me, just the other evening during one of those now rare, post-moviegoing strolls, my musings on A Scanner Darkly were interrupted by one of my companions picking a good moment to rain on my parade:
"Where are you going to preschool? If you haven't already applied you've probably missed the boat."
Happily the movie hadn't filled me with a sense of wellbeing and faith in the world- otherwise my bubble would surely have burst.
And fortunately for everyone I already attended preschool, though I don't think the things I learned there are necessarily going to help me get my act together in September, when all of this nagging should force me into action.
Until then, I'll just be curling up with a book that is designed to help people navigate the dicey social circles that everyone encounters in new schools. One of the featured titles on my nightstand is: Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads (sequel to the text that inspired the movie Mean Girls, Queen Bees & Wannabes).
posted by Elise at 12:06 PM
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Bad Parents on the Brain
The heat, while breathtaking (and getting worse, I am reminded), hasn't been what's kept me up the last few nights. That honor goes to a weighty collection of 18 issues of the Marvel Comic Runaways (written by Brian K. Vaughan), which my husband placed in my hands, knowing as he does my taste in comics. (I've been a dedicated reader of specific comics, but not one who typically seeks new things out on her own, which is probably why I tend to respond well to stories that have been around for a while and are readable in big collections. This started with Ronin and Elektra: Assassin when I was in middle school. I hate sitting around tapping my foot, for instance, for more Hellboy to appear.)
Anyway, a conversation about whether Muriel Spark and Martha Gellhorn's treatment of their children could qualify them as evil, made me think about Runaways which takes as its inspiration the thought that most children have, at some point, at least in passing.
They wonder if their parents are evil- or if not evil, exactly, then so fundamentally wrong and misguided as to be terrifying.
I'm guilty of this, having gone through a phase as a young child of being quite certain that my parents were robbers who stole me from my "real" parents.
But in Runaways, this suspicion is made flesh when six children- each the single, coddled child of overachievers- discover that their parents are a cabal of supervillans.
The kids do run away, but then they're stuck wondering what to do. It is enough to seek safety? Do they have to stop their parents? If so, how can they figure out what their folks are up to? And, of course, what if the grown-ups are actually right about everything and even a little blood sacrifice here and there is somehow justifiable?
The parents, too, are complicated, working at all kinds of cross-purposes, trapped by their abilities, their pride, their pricey decisions, and their passion for their children that destabilizes every plan they ever made.
It's all fun, though. And interesting. I can't say much more because to reveal anything probably reveals too much, if you're the kind who likes suspense and hates spoilers. So I'll just toss out a few key words and leave it at that: witch, logician, mutant, (space) alien, murder, empath, vampire, velociraptor, betrayal, family, love.
It's not a television show, but, hey, Joss Whedon liked it enough to write a fan letter (published in the back of the book).
posted by Elise at 7:43 PM
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Mothers With Devil Tongues
In the past months, a couple of writers have been written about significantly enough so that even I would notice. One of them, Muriel Spark, died in April and the other, Martha Gellhorn, while dead for a while, has just had a large collection of her letters published and widely reviewed (it crops up on a bunch of those lists of "books I'll read this summer" where literary types submit their picks to newspaper surveys).
What struck me, in reading about each of these women- whose work I have read (but not extensively) is how incredibly savage they were in print to their sons. This is not at all to diminish their extraordinary talent and courage and the facts of the lives they made for themselves that are fascinating. Spark is known for her novels (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, anyone?) and Gellhorn was a novelist, war reporter (covering the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Vietnam War), and journalist. Her numerous marriages include one to Ernest Hemmingway.
Both women don't seem to have become parents by accident. (Gellhorn actually adopted her son, Sandy in 1949; it is interesting to note that she had a stepson, also named Sandy) but each gave up on motherhood in a fundamental sense. Both of them seemed to find anything that smacks of domesticity boring and stifling, and perhaps given the times in which they lived and their inability to see beyond themselves made their children the worst logical extension of their fears of being trapped. Spark left her son, Robin, with nuns in Rhodesia (where she had been living with her husband) when she divorced and returned to England, and a year later settled him with her parents in Scotland while she lived in London. For her part, Gellhorn enlisted her mother to supervise her son and later tended to leave him in the care of a subsequent husband's household and boarding schools.
I'm glossing over all of this and not doing any justice to the nuances of Spark's and Gellhorn's lives because that's not really what struck me when I read about them. What I found shocking was how absolutely cruel both women decided to be to their sons when they were grown.
Muriel Spark and Robin had a falling out over whether Spark's mother had ever been Jewish (Spark, a Catholic, denied this categorically), and Spark pressed her disgust with her child hard, dismissing his work as an artist. In a newspaper interview that was subsequently quoted in her New York Times obituary she said: "He can't sell his lousy paintings, and I have had a lot of success. He keeps sending them to me and I don't know what to do with them. I can't put them on my wall. He's never done anything for me, except for being one big bore."
It is unclear what sorts of spats developed between Martha and Sandy Gellhorn (though sources have suggested that Gellhorn's difficulties were profound; her obsession with slimness may have been tough to handle- a version of her will apparently made his inheritance contingent on his weight). Kate McLoughlin in her Times Literary Supplement review of Gellhorn's collected letters comments on an incredibly bleak moment:
"`You are a poor and stupid little fellow in my eyes,' she informed him, `I have no respect for you, and at present little affection." These letters are scarifying, not least because their presence here shows that Sandy Gellhorn kept them and the sadness in the last sections of the volume is her silence towards him." Times Literary Supplement, June 23, 2006)
So my question is not whether these women should have had children or not. I'm not particularly interested in that. But why did they feel they could be so vicious, so cruel to their kids? What reward is there in that? Even if they felt their sons were kind of dim, what is the point of pulling out the butcher knives? How must these sons have felt when their mothers publicly dismissed everything about them? How awful to know that the world will find them either victims of their glittering mothers, or pathetic disappointments.
I'm not a fan of canned sentiment, but Spark's and Gellhorn's behavior is unimaginable to me. I understand the feeling of being impatient and inclined to snap. It is an old friend of mine that surges into my throat periodically, but thinking people stupid is a luxury best kept private. Sharing contempt outside of a psychoanalytic situation is cruel and unproductive. And for these women to eviscerate their children publicly on the one hand, and in print on the other is such a monstrous abuse of power. How awful that instead of being inclined to protect or at least be kind to their children they felt compelled to tear at them in ways that make one cringe. They each did remarkable things and while their feelings were certainly their own to have, the things they said to their sons only diminishes them.
(For the record, both sons have managed to navigate the waters their mothers churned up with dignity. Here is an article where Robin Spark handles unpleasant questioning about his mother's estate quite well. And Sandy Gellhorn and Sandy Matthews (his step-brother) gave Caroline Moorhead complete access to their mother's letters and writings so that Moorhead could write a biography and edit collections of Gellhorn's letters.)
posted by Elise at 10:44 AM
1 Comments
How Many Stories in the Naked City?
Summertime and the living, in New York at least, is a little weird.
It is always the way, so I have come to expect the flood of strange news that fills the tabloids every summer. It's as if all the freakiest people have been trying for months to control themselves and then once a large chunk of the population starts vacationing or going off to beachy summer shares, decides that the time is right to let it all hang out.
Yesterday a man committed suicide by putting his head on the third rail of a downtown number 6 subway train (shades of The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3- a winter movie, but still)
On Monday the New York Post broke the story that prostitutes are finally (finally!) reclaiming the streets of Hell's Kitchen "not far from cops posted at the Lincoln Tunnel to thwart potential terrorist attacks." (Is the concern here that they will distract New York's Finest? It seems that an opportunity is being overlooked and these folks could be recruited as low-rent Mata Hari-s- they're looking in the cars anyway.)
But of course all of the standard oddities (oxymoronic, I know) have been overshadowed by the Divorce That Shook Manhattan. A doctor, having been ordered to sell his Upper East Side townhouse (valued at anywhere from $4-9 million) and give half the proceeds to his ex-wife took a different route. He decided to kill himself and take the building with him by tampering with the gas line and exploding the whole thing. He survived though sadly the building didn't. Several people were hurt, though no one is expected not to make a recovery.
There are plenty of facets of this story to lament, but one of them is that this was a historic building, a landmark, according to the New York Landmarks Conservancy, and had been the site of some intrigue. In 1917, a group of "prominent New Yorkers" founded a group that they called "The Room" and held covert gossip sessions at 34 East 62nd Street (then a rental building). According to the New York Times, the crowd included enough names to keep conspiracy theorists happy for weeks: "Vincent Astor, a close friend of Roosevelt; the book publisher Nelson Doubleday; Winthrop W. Aldrich, the president of the Chase National Bank; Kermit Roosevelt, a son of Theodore Roosevelt, David K. E. Bruce, a son-in-law of Andrew W. Mellon and a future ambassador to France, West Germany and Britain; the philanthropist William Rhinelander Stewart; and Marshall Field III, a newspaper publisher and heir to the Chicago department store fortune." The Room made itself particularly useful during the Second World War by helping President Roosevelt with counterespionage.
So this is one of those things that makes New York fabulous, in spite of the fact that it took a nutcase and a building collapse to bring it to mind*: there is always something going on underneath- every story is personal. I think about this all the time, when I see the buildings on the Landmark Conservancy's endangered list or when I remember that as much as my parents hate the bar in their building, Louis Armstrong used to play there with some regularity.
I even think about it when the crap underneath provides entertainment for my kid. Just now, as he was about to lose it, his tantrum was stopped in its tracks by the arrival of a DEP truck. An environmental protection guy hopped out, pulled up a manhole cover and sent his truck's curious crane machine under the sidewalk to grab huge bunches of sewer-clogging gook. The man knew his audience. Felix was delighted and it's always interesting to watch how things really work.
*So before you go shouting, I'm not diminishing the fear, the damage, the mess and all the other awfulness that goes along with a building collapse.
posted by Elise at 10:24 AM
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Sealed Lips Redux
"That's one of the tragedies of this life," says John D. Hackkensacker III (played by ultra-charmer Rudy Vallee) in The Palm Beach Story, "that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous."
I maintain that lament and can add one, that the people most in need of shame are inevitably selectively deaf.
Just now, on the street, I nearly bit a woman who decided that the moment when I was trying to wrestle with a slavering terrier, shouting child and bags that refused to give up the container of cereal I know I tucked into one of them, to say: "Excuse me! Excuse me! His legs are getting too much sun." I informed her that my kid had sun block on (for all the good it does) but flew into a private rage. What the hell was I supposed to do if he didn't have any protection? Throw the dog on top of his little legs? Rip off my shirt and tuck it around his tan little limbs? (This is something the whole of downtown Manhattan should be glad I didn't consider.
But really, really. Here is just a little public service announcement. Unless a child is in some kind of unbelievably savage danger, give the parent a bit of credit and mind your own business. If the kid gets a little burnt, you won't be the one dealing with it. If he falls down and skins his knee, it won't be the first time. If he wants to hold a whole apple turnover and smear it all over himself, you won't be the one doing laundry because you will never see these people or this kid again. For that, everyone is grateful.
I'm not immune to noticing things, but I have a modicum of self-control. I didn't, for instance, tell the woman in the thin red dress walking in front of me this afternoon that perhaps it wasn't the best idea to put on underpants with such dark stripes. Maybe that was her point.
Perhaps I am too prickly. Not being particularly temperate, I'm used to living with being irritated and quietly intolerant and disguise it well, but nothing gets my dander up quite as quickly as suggesting that I am falling down as a parent. That's a special privilege that only I have. I maintain so few that I won't give this one up.
This syndrome kicked in as soon as Felix was home from the hospital. I snapped at my grandfather (88 at the time) who thought he could tell me that I wasn't holding Felix correctly; got chilly with people who told me that I shouldn't drink coffee and nurse; snarled at strangers who psychically decided that Felix thought he was too cold; and I still get crap from people who think he ought to wear a hat more often.
(He won't. It's my business that he won't and that's why I am giving special thanks this summer to the people who invented continuous spray sunblock.)
I locked horns with my husband recently on the subject of "model parents"- he feels the idea that there are competent people out there is comforting while I dislike comparison. I go my own way and it is a way that doesn't involve endless rules or special diets or extreme protocols or delicate routines. If those are for you, that's wonderful, and if it makes you and yours happy, that is all you can ask. . . but keep it to yourself.
posted by Elise at 12:04 PM
4 Comments
Baby's First Product Recall
So while looking for something else entirely today, I discovered that one of Felix's toys has been recalled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Apparently, if it is broken in a certain way a part of it could become a choking hazard.
This is very sad since he really does love it, but I called the company and sure enough, they are having me send it back to them in exchange for a substitute toy (that is unlikely to be as much fun).
At any rate, I am not someone who meticulously checks labels for age-appropriateness and I am lucky that Felix is not a chewer. (What he really is, is a taunter, who goes around pretending to put things in his mouth, or beside his mouth so that he can be corrected over and over again. It never gets old.)
It was just random fortune that made me learn about the problem in the first place, so I could have gone on with the toy in the living room for a small eternity. But there's something about the actual recall that makes me unwilling to cling to this beloved, undamaged item. Once the thing has been named hazardous, keeping it around means something different. It's a little like a more dangerous version of waltzing out of the house while one's mother's voice hovers in the air behind one: "Go ahead, don't take a sweater, but if you're cold you can't complain."
It is standard practice for parents to check on recalls? Does anyone greet the dawn of the new month by flipping the wall calendar over, popping a heartworm pill in the dog's mouth, saying "rabbit, rabbit" for luck, and doing a quick check to the Consumer Product Safety Commission Recalls list?
Not that it isn't interesting, of course. All sorts of things beside toys get reeled back to their makers. June saw the recall of dive computers that display an incorrect "elapsed dive time" which can encourage divers to ascend too quickly, and possibly get the bends; some sandals that can cause lacerations; dangerous hammock stands; and treadmills that have "unexpected speed changes."
The obvious, goes without saying bottom line is that one must keep an eye on little critters. (This came as a hard lesson years ago when the terrier was a wicked pup and ate a needle, after biting it in half- what do you think he is, a pig?- first.) And when it comes to choking hazards, as someone asked me recently, what are people with multiple children supposed to do when the older ones favor little tiny Legos that look like candy and delicious magnets?
posted by Elise at 11:18 AM
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Tradition
We managed to get through the gauntlets of highway driving with reasonable amounts of screaming and spilling, and hadn't even finished picking the sand out of our teeth when the annual tradition that I always forget about until it jumps out and bites me. It is nipping now.
Every summer is the Summer of Angry Appliances.
I should have seen it coming when the vacuum cleaner quit two weeks ago (finally unhappy, perhaps, that the terrier failed to understand its incredible usefulness and persisted in biting it), but this latest development really hit home. The air conditioner has failed.
There are many reasons to despise the air conditioner, but the thing keeps us all from losing our minds. Someone promises to show up and tinker this morning, so there is the proverbial light in this tunnel.
But these incidents always, always remind me about how poorly I deal with the domestic. I am bad at diagnosing appliance problems. ("Why, no. I have no idea if the compressor is working. We haven't actually been introduced. What would you say the compressor looks like?") It is difficult for me to explain technically what certain problems are. ("Well, when I said that the drain doesn't drain, I really meant that water will continue to pool in the sink until it overflows.") Sinks are actually my bete noire. It took me years of not-wildly-diligent pursuit to replace a sink bowl that got smashed, no doubt by some misstep of my own.
Mornings like this one, I can't help but think about Joan Didion's wonderful essay about migraine "In Bed," with which I fell in love shortly after I was diagnosed with migraine. (In college went to the doctor and said: "Don't tell my mother, but I'm seeing double and have this headache that is so bad it has to be a brain tumor.") Here is the passage that rings loud this morning:
"We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I. It never comes when I am in real trouble. Tell me that my house is burned down, my husband has left me, that there is gunfighting in the streets, and panic in the banks, and I will not respond by getting a headache. It comes instead when I am fighting not an open but a guerrilla war with my own life, during weeks of small household confusions, lost laundry, unhappy help, canceled appointments, on days when the telephone rings too much and I get no work done and the wind is coming up. On days like that my friend comes uninvited." (From Joan Didion's "In Bed" published in The White Album
The atmosphere is dodgy today.
posted by Elise at 5:00 AM
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