Alice's Adventures Underground

I just can't figure out how they were able to sing while having a scope run down their throats.

Usually, this little mosquito hatchery pond in the woods near my house looks like a big garbage dump. Isn't it interesting how fall colors make everything more Victorian?

Spiderman = mine
Surprised Frankenstein = The Dormouse's creation
Tiny angry pumpkin = The Caterpillar's (with a little help from The KoH)

First - here is today's picture:


And now, a story.

I gave The KingofHearts his birthday present almost a month ago: tickets to Mike Birbiglia so close that you ran the risk of being spat upon during the show. (Not that you tend to spit, Mike, I don't want to end up in your next show like the pants pressing guy, I'm just sayin' we were close. So close that if you were the type to spit - though I'm sure you're not - you could take a page from Gallagher and hand out raincoats to the first several rows. And we would have been given raincoats. That's how close we were. Great for the bulk of the show; kinda made that reenactment of throwing up on the amusement park ride a little discomforting though.)

But I digress.

I couldn't let the occasion of Daddy's actual birthday go by without a Tribute to Daddy Cake. And what more fitting tribute to Daddy than something that says who Daddy is? Call me Captain Obvious, but we went the nerdy, geek route:


For the record, I would like it noted that this was an original idea I came up with using all my own brain power. Since I normally steal all my ideas from some random, faceless person in the Interweb, you can imagine how much more disturbing it was then, that while I was Googling for images of the Periodic Table of the Elements so I could get the colors right, I found at least a dozen pictures posted by people who have made, received or eaten a Periodic Table made entirely from cupcakes. Don't you hate it when people steal your ideas before you have them? Me too.

Either way, our Periodic Table of Cupcakes was a big hit. He saw it and then for forty-five minutes, sat there pointing from cupcake to cupcake and naming all the elements on the table one by one... in fact, he sounded like this guy:




And then The Caterpillar got into the act and it eerily sounded like a moment from my past for a bit. But all that ended with the hilarity that is The Caterpillar trying to pronounce "aluminum."

We had another one of those Superflocks of birds come through the neighborhood the other day.

I knew they were there even before I looked outside.

How did I know, you ask?

The KingofHearts has been into drinking herbal teas lately and he likes honey instead of sugar or sweetener. Unfortunately, he grossly overestimated how long to put the honey in the microwave to simply soften it enough to make it pourable and now this is what our honey dispenser looks like:


I can't help but think that Winnie the Pooh looks over my shoulder from some omniscient Hundred Acre Wood Heaven and cries a big stuffed tear every time I use this.

There are two musicals that I know like the back of my hand - mostly because I've played in the pit orchestra for both of them multiple times and when you sit through all the rehearsals of a show, you tend to learn a line or two. One of them is West Side Story. I've played two different performances of this and it's one of my favorites. When I was in college, we participated in a state competition of stage shows and we won best orchestra - which was no easy feat with that music. Bernstein's score, while brilliant, is not very straightforward and certainly not simple to play. I learned to love the score and the fact that just about every musical device that could be employed was... because that's Bernstein. But I won't lie, we worked our little fingers to the bone for every inch of that trophy and complained about it the whole time. I don't remember very much of the play in either production I played in because I was so busy counting and living in fear that I'd miss one of those oh-so-important cues, without which, the dancers wouldn't know whether to kick up or kick out. Last year we went to see the fiftieth anniversary revival of the production at the National Theater in D.C., where it all started in 1957 and it was pretty darn cool especially when I realized halfway through that I was holding my breath for the strings during the fight scene and I wouldn't have to worry about being the only person playing in that grand pause that was coming up.

The other musical I know like a lover is Fiddler on the Roof. When I was probably still in elementary school, I saw it in a theater for the fist time and loved it. Then in high school, I played in the pit orchestra for our school's production of Fiddler. I've often thought that it'd be good training for actors who want to learn their lines to attend high school play rehearsals. Just from the sheer repetition, I know almost every line from every character. I was "the fiddler" in my high school's production - or rather, I played the fiddle solos from the pit while someone else pranced around on stage in a fake beard and pretended to be playing. I've never really understood why they can't use a real violinist in that part, but even in the many professionally-produced performances I've attended, I've not seen it yet. Which is weird, because in the production we saw Friday night, they had the fiddler pantomime playing the violin, but had a real clarinetist and a real accordion player on stage during the wedding scene. I'm still shaking my head over that one.

I could be wrong, but I think that our high school version of Fiddler was also the show where the stage crew decided to be real tools about the auditorium and refused to let us have food or drinks during rehearsals in the pit. Rehearsals that sometimes lasted four hours and started immediately after school and "drinks" that included the water the wind players used for their reeds, so they had to sneak in tiny vials of water to soak their reeds in if they wanted to... you know... play. It got so ridiculous that at the final performance, as an adolescent act of protest, we brought in a toaster oven, cheese, pepperoni, pizza sauce and during the rests in the music and dialogue, while Tevye and Lazar Wolf were toasting La'chaim on stage, we were making mini-pizzas down below and reasoning, "What are they gonna do? Kick us out?" During intermission, I went out to see a few people in the audience and had to play dumb when people said, "I smell pizza. Do you smell pizza?"

We also went around school communicating with each other in only lines from Fiddler, said in the same melodramatic way our peers uttered them on stage:

"After a lifetime, a piece of paper and 'get thee out.'"

"Oh, I'm losing my head. One day it will fall off altogether, and a horse will kick it into the mud, and. goodbye, Yente."

We may or may not have been some of the nerdier kids in the school.

A couple of weeks ago, The KingofHearts came home saying, "I just bought your birthday present... but I'm not gonna tell you what it is... or nevermind, I'll tell you." He reasoned that since the event was nowhere near my birthday and so it made no difference, but I know the truth: no one in this family can keep a secret. His surprise was that he got us tickets to see Fiddler on the Roof with the original actor, Topol, in the role of Tevye.

In 1971, Chaim Topol played Tevye in the film version after making the role his own in the stage production. If you want to see one of the best performances on film or on stage any where, any time, rent this and watch Topol. He is truly entertaining in every sense of the word and if ever there was a person born to play a role, it's Topol born to play Tevye. If you want to see the magic of Topol on stage in person, you still have time - like we did Friday night. Topol, we learned from a quick internet phone search during intermission, was born in 1935. That makes him seventy-four years old as of the performance we just sat through and all I can say is, I wish I could be that spry at seventy-four. From the moment he walked out on stage (and the ovation that ensued when the audience saw him) he was brilliant. Since I've seen the movie multiple times, it was evident that since 1971 he might have slowed down a bit here and there, but also: not much. That big gorgeous voice was still there, he danced around stage with the best of them and in person (and probably after thirty-eight years of playing the same role over twenty five hundred times) he had a lot more fun with the actors and the audience. I kept saying to The KoH how amazing it was that he did such small things on stage, facial expressions, little throaty noises, picking at his actor-children like a father would, etc. and they all translated to that giant room full of people. I don't know many stage actors capable of that.

So instead of going on about him, take a look for yourself. I hope you'll enjoy him as much as we did because it was sure a treat.

This is one of the few pumpkins that we did not pick up at the pumpkin patch.

It's National Blog Posting Month... or my favorite acronym to mess with: NaBloPoMo.

The rules of NaBloPoMo are simple: post at least once every day for the entire month of November or feel like a sad, pathetic failure who should only aspire to a career holding the Slow sign by the side of the road and crawl into a hole, never to show your face on the interweb again. Or maybe I misinterpreted the intent. Anyway, I've participated in this for the last three years running and I feel I can't break stride now.

If you can't tell by the veritable plethora of posts the last few months, it's not been all that difficult for me to post something every day. When I started this blog I never intended to be one of those "post every day" kind of people. In fact, I'm not. What I am is a "get a whole bunch of ideas in one day" kind of people and a "better put them in the drafts folder before I forget them because I didn't write them down" kind of people, then later a "post-schedule them all because I feel weird publishing nine posts in one day" kind of people. Posting something well thought out, meaningful, insightful or useful to anyone else reading it, might be a little more of a challenge, but that just seems HARD. So instead, my twist on NaBloPoMo this year is that I will post one photograph for each day of November - if I write something, bonus, but the photos are a must. Oh, and no snapshots; this has to be a photograph I might be willing to submit to a show or use in a graphic design project. I really want to move my photography skillz to the next level and short of buying a really good camera which costs a couple grand, this seems like a reasonable (and cheaper) alternative to make me at least try to become a better photographer.

By way of excuse, for whatever reason, the resolution of photographs on this blog is a bit funky. Sometimes I take what I think is a beautiful, crisp photo which looks like a treasure on my laptop screen, then I upload it to the blog all proud of myself and I look at my web page only to find that it looks pretty darn ho hum. I have never been able to find a way around this and lack the motivation to inquire, but if you click on most of the photographs, they have been uploaded in a higher resolution and will open in a screen by themselves. When I do this, I generally feel a little less bad about how they look. If you care, you can try too.

So here's my first photo of the month - let's call it A Tribute to Autumn.

In the language department, The Caterpillar is coming along nicely. I can't help but think that that's thanks to all that worrying I did before. Almost as soon as she started talking, she began using more complex concepts in speech. While The Dormouse spent quite a long time talking about herself in the third person and saying the names of things but not incorporating them in a sentence, The Caterpillar - once she did start talking - almost immediately began using pronouns correctly and was able to communicate abstract concepts like, "I'm cold." Which only further confirms my opinion that it wasn't that she wasn't taking in and/or understanding language, but that it took awhile for the nine muscles of the mouth to develop enough to where she could form the words. Even now, she's still really hard to understand sometimes and if I close my eyes, I'm almost sure I'm having a conversation with Charlie Brown's parents. But it's clear she's working on it.

Last week she got a flu shot and proudly wore the band-aid badge of honor for at least three days before The KingofHearts tore the band-aids off in the bath one night.

"Why did you do that?" I asked.

"Because, she doesn't need them anymore."

"You have to know that it was never about the needing them, right? She didn't need them three seconds after she got the shots. She WANTS them."

"Yeah, but eventually they have to come off right?"

"OK, but you live with it."

"Live with what?"

"I think I'll go to the store for some new band-aids now."

And then: oh, the injustice to strip her of her dignity like that! And we heard about it. Because for the next five days, she repeated, "DaDee. Don'T TaKe ofF my BanD-AiD." Just like that. Hitting all the consonants with the emphasis of an elephant stomping his feet.

Over.

And.

Over.

And.

Over.

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard that in the past week, I could buy a year's supply of BanD-AiDs.

It's not that I don't want my kids to speak. I just wonder if once they learned, they could try an communicate when necessary and be quiet the rest of the time. Because Momma has a headache.

Every year when we go to the pumpkin patch, we drive through Charles Town, West Virginia past this house. This is what our house would look like each year if The KingofHearts had unlimited money... and I was dead. Since he's sure to die before me (*ahem* not that I'm planning anything), we drive up here and he lives vicariously through these people.












Special bonus Halloween message, because I been unable to find an appropriate place to stick this before now. Early in the season, The KoH brought home a Halloween decoration in the form of a skeleton head in a lantern. When you push a button, it's says in an eerie, echo-y voice, "Wha ha ha ha." After The Caterpillar's initial trepidation, she warmed up and began referring to it as the "wha ha ha."

As in: "Momma, turn ona wha ha ha?"

"Where wha ha ha?"

"I love you, wha ha ha!"

Somewhere after that, she learned that ghosts are really just people with sheets over their heads and began grabbing a blanket, throwing it over her head and saying, "Imahaha!"

So a skeleton is a "wha ha ha" and a ghost is a "ha ha" in our house.

I desperately want to remember these times, because I know very soon she will be referring to them as skeletons and ghosts and that will be a very sad day, indeed.

Here's she is trying to scare The KoH out of reading his book.



And lastly, if you don't celebrate Halloween because it's "the Devil's birthday" like some of the kids in The Dormouse's class, but prefer instead to attend a "Harvest Festival," like the one the had at The Dormouse's school this week because "Halloween" is just too offensive, consider this:

On an Evangelical church near my home: HARVEST FESTIVAL TRUNK OR TREAT OCTOBER 31. “Trunk or treat” I can understand. Some Mormon congregations do this too. It’s a way to suck all the fun out of trick-or-treating by handing out candy in a church parking lot from a row of car trunks. But “Harvest festival”? Uh, for the last time, people: Halloween is the eve of All Saints’ Day, part of the Christian liturgical calendar! “Harvest Festival” would be the pagan holiday! Not the other way around! This would be like a church replacing “Christmas Eve” with “Yule Festival” because some overzealous Sunday regular is anti-Santa. Okay, pastor, I get that you have some nuts in your congregation telling you that Halloween is all about the worship of Satan and his bastard stepchild Harry Potter. I don’t care. It’s time to man up to the weirdos.

Thanks to Ken Jennings for this bit of brilliance

My grandfather, who will be one hundred years old next month, told me this when I was about eight and I asked him what a pun was: "A good farmer is out standing in his field." I don't know why, but I've never forgotten it and every time we go to West Virginia to go pumpkin picking, this keeps running through my mind.

We may or may not have gone overboard at the pumpkin patch this year.






On the plus side, I'll be making a lot of pumpkin pies very soon.

This may look like a bag of crap, but really, it's full of wondrous and spectacular treasures.


Don't see it? I'll explain. Last Saturday, when I'd been working pretty much twelve days straight, at some point I realized that I was starting to turn into Jimmy Jet in that Shel Silverstein poem. So I decided to take an hour and go take a walk with the girls -- oh, and because The KoH had to work that Saturday and I could no more spend another day in the house with both girls than I could have tried out for a tight end position on the Pittsburgh Steelers and started in the next game. To make it more interesting, I took this idea from the Frugal Family Fun website that I'm currently obsessed with and decided to have an Autumn Treasure Hunt. I gave the list and a pencil to The Dormouse and we wandered off into the woods behind our house, praying that The Goatman or The Bunnyman didn't get us. I promised The Dormouse a blog post of our adventures so here's our list and a photo essay of what we collected:










































So that's it for our Autumn Treasure Hunt. Maybe next time I'll actually bury some treasure.

This has been the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad month from hell. Octobers usually are for some reason and, as such, we have renamed the month "Sucktober" to more adequately express our feelings about said month. A combination of four or five sixty-hour work-weeks, no sleep, school closures, several missed deadlines, children in trouble at school, an injury and subsequent argument with a day care provider or two, two drops of rain causing a three hour trip to the dentist (yes, D.C., it's sprinkling so let's all drive ONE), and a dishwasher that I thought we'd fixed but had to ultimately be replaced, thereby causing financial distress for next three or so months have all formed together to be a perfect storm of ennui.

After her dentist appointment this week, The Dormouse was given the chance to pick a small toy out of the toy bin (this dentist, wisely, does not give out lollipops to good little children who behave, but rather non-cavity-inducing toys). She took... oh about... SEVEN YEARS to peruse the entire selection of Oriental Trading Company crap and then carefully picked a set of neon green vampire teeth. Because, and this is reasoning for a six year old, they would go well with her Halloween costume. This costume:


Say no more. I know.

So after the dentist and the one and a half hour car ride to take her back to school and before the one hour car ride for me to get back to work, she asked me if I could walk her into the school and if she could wear her neon green vampire teeth into the office to play a prank on the attendance clerk. I let her do that but told her that she was not allowed to bring them to class. Instead, I agreed to take them and keep them safe in the car for later. She complied (reluctantly) and I walked out of the front door with a set of neon green vampire teeth in my pocket. But somewhere between the front door and my car, the teeth must have fallen out of my pocket and I lost them. I knew it almost immediately as I drove away but I was pretty sure I wasn't going to find them if I went back and thought one of three things might happen: a) she'd forget about them completely, b) she wouldn't care by the time she figured it out, or c) I'd buy another set at the drugstore.

Well, she did not forget about them completely. In fact, the SECOND she got off the bus that night, she asked for them and I had to fess up like a kid explaining to his mom how he'd lost his retainer again. And boy howdy, let me tell you, she DID care and there was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. So amidst all the tears, I promised that I would get her another set of vampire teeth. But then I didn't have time to do it that day, because hello? sixty-hour work week.

So last night I finished the latest Big Work Thing - as in The World's Gonna End if You Don't Finish It On Time But No One Cared When They All Missed Their Deadlines to Give Me Their Part of It, Big Work Thing - and took this morning off to take care of a few things like personal hygiene and buying a new set of neon green vampire teeth, mainly because she has her Halloween Costume Parade today and she "needs those vampire teeth to complete the look" since she wasn't allowed to bring an actual pirate sword to school. (the run on sentences, they just keep a'comin')

I didn't even care if they were neon green. I just wanted a crappy plastic set of vampire teeth. It was the one thing I thought I could accomplish, could control this month, could be successful at, buying that set of plastic vampire teeth, and I was bound and determined to accomplish it. So I went to not one, not two, not three (yadda yadda yadda, you get the picture here), but EIGHT, count them EIGHT different party stores, Targets, Wal-Marts, grocery stores and drugstores with The Caterpillar in tow - in and out of the car with inevitable complaints every time and chasing her through the store when I happened to look at the shelf to see if a tooth or two were hidden behind the gummy eyeballs - and none of them, NOT ONE of them in a twenty-mile radius, had a single pair of fake vampire teeth - TWO DAYS BEFORE HALLOWEEN.

I even considered finding a vampire, asking him to bite me, then once I was turned, going to school before the parade started and pulling her into the bathroom to bite her so by the parade she'd have her very own vampire teeth but, as you can imagine, that was only slightly less successful than finding the stupid plastic teeth in the first place. At some point, I realized that I should have just given up on a two dollar prop, but this was the one thing in my week I could control and dammit, I was GOING TO FIND THOSE TEETH. In the end, I was as unsuccessful as I have been with every other effin' thing I've tried to accomplish this month, and I know that it's just a stupid set of teeth and I'll remember this more than she will in three days, but I promised her and THE GUILT, IT BURNS.

Sometimes, when you're a parent, you look back over your single life and you think, "If anyone had told me I would waste a half a gallon of gas, an entire morning, and a good portion of my sanity to find a set of plastic molded vampire teeth to go with a pirate girl costume for a school parade, surely I would have called them crazy."

Look who's crazy now.

Why oh why did I decide to have girls?

This is the last of my cemetery series of photos. So if this kind of topic bothers you, I apologize. You understand, don't you? Sometimes these things just have to run their course... like a disease.

One of my favorite authors (and I have a LOT of favorite authors) is Robert Fulghum, of All I Ever Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten fame. You might be surprised to know that he wrote stuff other than that famous essay and if you think that it's trite and overused, you might actually find that some of his other writings are much better than that one. You might also like his style so much that you start a blog and in your own very feeble way, try (and mostly fail) to write like him. I'm just sayin'...

Anyway, in one of his essays in this book, Fulghum ponders what kind of tombstone he'd like to have.

These words are chiseled into the edge of the bench and are an epitaph. For the bench is, in fact, a tombstone in a cemetery. And I would take you there to sit if I could. You wouldn't feel uncomfortable sitting on it, I promise. You wouldn't even notice what it was at first. It's right on the edge of a paved lane that curves through the burial grounds, placed so that you are clearly invited to use it. The closest living thing is a dawn redwood tree, comforting in its great age and size - a stout and worthy companion.

The placement of this bench, the words on the edge, the consciousness of the view - all say that someone went to a lot of trouble to be useful in death. A parting gesture of quiet generosity has been made.

I've spent a lot of time over the years thinking about death. My death, others' deaths, doesn't matter. Chalk it up to a combination of family history, morbid hobbies, and just generally thinking too much. But even before I read this essay by Fulghum, I think I'd decided that if I were to choose what my graves' memorial would be, it would be a stone bench. Nothing ostentatious, very little writing. Just a stone bench under a tree in a place where people could have a nice view and enjoy taking a rest.

I don't know when it became popular - maybe Fulgham's essay even had something to do with it - but when I was living in the West as a kid, I almost never saw a bench like this as a marker. Our local cemetery here, however, is filled with these benches.


There are even benches like this in the varying ethnic sections of this cemetery. I posted another photograph of one in this post.

But this bench I speak of is another story. Unique. No name. No conventional epitaph. And no dates. Just an unspoken open invitation for anyone to site and think. What marks this grave is the gift of silent companionship that bridges loneliness. In all the cemeteries I have visited around the world, I have seen nothing like it - and nothing so fine.

And it was on that bench, the summer morning after my fiftieth birthday, that I came to that moment in life when one crosses over from the abstract intellectual knowledge that all human beings die to the active realization that I will die. Me. Fulghum. Will not be. Sooner or later.

Not only did I realize that I will die, but I walked away thinking, Well, it's okay.

I don't know what it is... my past of helping out at the mortuary during summers when I visited family, my religious convictions, my philosophy of life, but death has never seemed like a big thing to me. In the best sense of the words: it's just another part of life. So why wouldn't a memorial shaped like a piece of furniture that is used every day in life be appropriate?

Just don't put "Bubba" on mine.

From the Chinese section of the cemetery. I am in love with these lions and couldn't stop taking photos of them. I like to think that at night they come to life and roam around the grounds, checking things out and surveying their domain. (Are you reading this Fox Studios? Could be an idea for another sequel to Night at the Museum. I'll let you know where to send my royalty check.) I also want to come back one day soon and when no one's looking, put little pink bows in their hair. Random, I know.

The cemetery I walked through the other day has a large Jewish section. I love to walk around here and look at the pebbles placed on the headstones. I'm not Jewish, religiously or ethnically, but there are some Jewish customs that I find so meaningful and poignant that I compulsively follow them anyway. One of them is the tradition of placing a stone on a grave when I visit. I think the most well-known example of this tradition is that last scene from Schlinder's List - a movie I was completely moved by for reasons I won't go into here, but simply cannot watch again due to the fact that I am not capable of experiencing those emotions again. Basically, my opinion about Schlinder's List is if you haven't seen it you should; it will change you forever. But if you have seen it you can't watch it again, because you've been changed forever.

/digression

I was curious to know how the tradition got started and/or what it symbolized, other than to tell visitors that followed that others had also visited the grave. So I consulted my resident anthropologist and religious historian, Dr. Google (PhD) and found the following meanings. Enjoy.

When the tradition started, grave monuments were mounds of stones. Visitors added stones to "the mound" to show we are never finished building the monument to the deceased.

Symbolically, it suggests the continuing presence of love and memory which are as strong and enduring as a rock. One name for God is "The Rock of Israel." So the rock is a reminder of the presence of the Rock, Whose love truly is stronger than death.

It is a sign of respect for the dead and stems from the symbolism of making sure the burial site is noted by a stone marker. While adding a small stone doesn't really add a permanent marking to the site, it has evolved to be one way in which an individual indicates participation in the process of marking a grave.

It may be the end result of the custom of writing notes to the deceased and pushing them into crevices in the headstone just as notes are pushed into the Western Wall in Jerusalem. When no crevice can be found, the note is weighted down with a stone. In time, the paper disintegrates or blows away, leaving only the stone. Thus, some began to think that the leaving of a stone was the custom... and so it became the custom.

There is a belief, with roots in the Talmud, that souls continue to dwell for a while in the graves in which they are placed. In the Eastern European folk imagination, these souls - even those that were benign in life - can take on a certain terror in death. The stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer and the plays of the Yiddish theatre, rich in the mythology of Eastern European Jewry, are filled with these types of hauntings: souls who returned, for whatever reason, to the world of the living. The practice of leaving stones atop a grave can be explained as a response to these beliefs. More than a simple marker of one's visit, stones on the grave are the means by which the living help weigh down souls to remain where they belong -- in the grave where they do no haunting.

Another beautiful answer to the stones on graves question takes its cue from the inscription on many gravestones: the five-letter Hebrew abbreviation taf, nun, tsadi, bet, hey, which stands for "teheye nishmato tsrurah b'tsror haChayyim." This phrase is usually translated as "May his soul be bound up in the bounds of eternal life" - a phrase wishing for eternal life for the departed.

Tsror (the fourth word of the Hebrew phrase) can also be translated as "pebble." So suddenly, the phrase takes on a more nuanced meaning, based on the historical significance of pebbles.

In ancient times, shepherds needed a system to keep track of their flocks. On some days, they would go out to pasture with a flock of thirty; on other days a flock of ten; the third day with fifty. As memory was an unreliable way of keeping tabs on the number of the flock that day, the shepherd would carry a sling over his shoulder, and in it keep the number of tsror, or pebbles, that corresponded to the number in his flock. That way he could have an accurate daily count. When we place stones on the grave, and inscribe the motto above on the stone, we are asking God to keep the departed's soul in God's sling. Among all the souls whom God has to watch over, we wish to add the name, or the "pebble," of the soul of our departed.


references here