The Real Charlie

Real Farmer Daddy?

I don't know about Farmer Daddy, but we are hosting two nice hens in our yard for two weeks in their fancy a-frame chicken tractor. Casey the chicken guy told us not expect eggs, but we'll see how that goes. We also haven't named them yet. One is white and the other multi-colored. The multi-colored one is quite feisty and a bit dim.

As you can imagine, Roxanne and Stella are most excited about our house guests.

My mother's family is from Colchester, Connecticut, once a hotbed of Jewish chicken farming in America. So I guess I'm back to my roots, in a strange sort of way. Updates as events warrant here and on facebook.

Did Mordechai Ever Eat Burritos?

I sat down to watch a little bit of golf this afternoon while Roxanne and Stella were having dinner and while Abby was cooking. I told Abby that it looked nice and warm and sunny at the tournament (it was cold and snowy here), and she asked where it was taking place. I told her, "Marana, outside Tucson." "Tucson," shouted Roxanne, "that's where Queen Esther lived!"

"Um, no Rox, " I responded, while Abby stifled her hysterics with a dish rag, "that would be Shushan, as in Persia, not Tucson, as in Arizona."

And Stella still conflates the words "misty" and "dusk" into a single term, so asking her at 5 Pm "what time of day is it?" brings a quick response of "Whiskey! This is the time of day I call whiskey!" How can I not smile when stuff like this happens around my house on a regular basis?

Deception!

Roxanne joined Abby and I at the dinner table tonight as we were finishing up our meal. "Tell daddy what question of the day was at school," Abby asked. "What do you like to hug," Roxanne told us. "What? That's not what you told me!" Abby responded.

Well, it turns out that at four years, ten months, Roxanne has discovered the joys of deception through sincerity. Roxanne, often deadpan and always dead serious seeming, convinced my wife that the "question of the day" at nursery school was "what is your favorite meat" and that, furthermore, all the kids answered "lamb chops." This should have raised flags, because 1) that is a strange thing to ask a bunch of 4 & 5 year olds, 2) most kids that age don't like lamb chops and 3) Roxanne loves lamb chops, obsessively so, and works them into any conversation imaginable. But no, Abby bought this story.

For your information, Roxanne's answer to the real question was her plush USA (aka Hugg America). My answers are "Roxanne and Stella" for hugging and "chicken" for the meat.

A Great Miracle Happened Here

Roxanne is a child with a very sharp memory and a relentless thirst for information. She is also smart enough to know that her father is occasionally wrong for either humorous effect or, God forbid, out of true error. So over Chanukah I told her about the letters on the dreidel, and that the dreidels in Israel have different letters - it's nun gimmel hay shin in the diaspora, and nun gimmel hay pey in Israel, spelling out (respectively) "a great miracle happened there" or "a great miracle happened here." She took this in soberly and seriously, and without comment.

Last week my arrival home (often greeted with truly charming laughter, dancing, shrieking and general goofy daddy-related enthusiasm) was greeted by Roxanne's breathless shouts of "look, look, daddy!" What I saw was this:

You may or may not recognize or be able to see the orange pey on the dreidel, but trust me, it is there.

Roxanne continued: "Daddy, Lilly brought these for our whole class from Israel. It has a pey on it. daddy, you were right! You were really right!"

My colleagues with teenagers who hear this story keep telling me to enjoy this now. Honestly though, they didn't need to tell to enjoy it.

From Holiday to Holiday

We tend to bounce from holiday to holiday around my house. Fourth of July can drag on into August (complete with flag waving, parades around the house and much singing of "Yankee Doodle,") Sukkot decorations start being colored and cut out in September, etc. Now we are getting ready for Halloween. I insisted that we avoid any creepy syncretism by not putting up our zombies and skeletons until our sukkah was safely disassembled in our garage, but now things are getting ghoulish in our yard, to match the general theme of the neighborhood. Halloween is big here in Wellesley. I know that the "holiday" is much frowned upon in Jewish circles nowadays, but I enjoy it, and so do my kids. I will have a fairy and a pharoah this year, which is so well matched to their personalities (an ancient tyrant and a cheerful pixie), and hope to share some images of cuteness.

The Four Species

So Sukkot starts tomorrow evening, and this is a Jewish holiday that I have come to love in recent years. Firstly, you get to do construction (and thanks to Abby for making 5769's sukkah building refreshingly free of cursing, crashing wood and abrasions, due to her excellent power drill skills). Second, you decorate by hanging all sorts of stuff from the roof and walls of your sukkah, thus indulging the repressed Christmas tree decorator hiding out inside many Jews. And third, if you choose, you buy the Four Species. The palm branch, myrtle branches, willow branches and etrog that you can shake and gawk at during the holiday. If you have no idea what I'm talking about google "lulav" and all will be revealed.

Now I can order my lulav and etrog from my shul, but that would deprive me of my annual trek to the crowded, hot basement of the Israel Book Shop in Brookline, where young men from Monsey work feverishly to assemble our lulavim, and where one can choose etrogim ranging in price from $45 to over $100. The lulav is basically imported sticks and come "free" with the etrog. This is one of my relatively  few annual encounters with the most Orthodox part of the Jewish community, and it is always an interesting one. The gentlemen are curt but polite as they deal with a guy (me) who is obviously not frum. In recent years I've brought Roxanne with me, and she finds the whole scene fascinating. This world of men in beards black hats haggling in Yiddish, Hebrew and English over lumpy lemons is a world away from her temple nursery school's neat and tidy world of Conservative Judaism.

So as we are leaving the store (purchases: lulav, etrog, two plush lulav and etrog sets and a sheet of lulav stickers) we pass a man in typical "black hat" Orthodox uniform: beard, dark suit, black hat. Roxanne turns to me and says, "Daddy, why do we always see that guy at the Israel Book Shop?" I keep a straight face and explain that we see a lot of guys who look like that here, but they are, in fact, different guys. Someday I may have to take Roxanne to Boro Park, or, God willing, Jerusalem, to prove that more than one guy is running around in a beard and black hat.

Observed

I took Roxanne to a birthday part today. She was one of two girls, and they both came in dresses. The boys, all seven of them, were attired in Red Sox and Patriots shirts, sweat pants and sneakers. Also, they made farting noises on their arms constantly, to much hysterical laughter. They inhaled their cake and ran outside screaming "kill!" Seriously now, this why I like to be the daddy of girls. Also, the cuteness:

Also, if you are thinking of doing apple picking, I recommend Dowse Orchards on Route 27 in Sherborn. They have a great farm stand and a very nice, low key pick your own operation up the road. We are up to our eyeballs in Macintoshes, Macouns and Ida Golds. The last one sounds like one of my clients, but is actually an apple. Seriously.

Learning to Fly

A postscript to my sea gull eviction post from last month. Today the building manager sent out a notice that gulls had nested on the roof of our building, and were teaching their babies how to fly, and we should be aware of any clumsy new fliers banging around outside our windows. My assistant saw them taking wing this afternoon. I'm sorry that I didn't get to see the little birds next door grow up. I wonder what happened to them.

On a not unrelated note, I watched Roxanne having a swimming lesson yesterday. The teacher looked like his patience was being tested; she seemed to be veering between tolerating the lesson and wanting out immediately. I so feel for her. I hated swimming lessons as a kid, found the required coordination hard to manage (kick and pull and breath and not swallow water?) and many of my teachers less than sympathetic. I hated, and still hate, getting my face in the water. I can tread water for a long time and out dog paddle most canines, but I am just a lousy swimmer. With luck Roxanne will take after her mother or my sister, both virtually amphibious. I just hope she can learn to enjoy it a least a little bit.

End of May?

It is hard to believe that May is almost over. The month didn't even fly by, it just vanished, in a flash. So, a few late spring updates and thoughts:

1) No, I still haven't gotten my 403(b) money emancipated yet. Yes, it has been two months. And yes, the nasty letter is coming. Should I start it out "Dear Thief" or "Dear Loser?"

2) Today I was walking home from the train, about 3/4 of the way home, and I heard some familiar squeaking from up ahead of me. My girls, all three of them were coming down the street. I waved, and the two little ones broke into a run (more of a gallop, actually) and caught up with me, and gave me a hug. My boss, whose daughters are 11 and 14, keeps telling me to enjoy this stuff, as the little girls get big fast.  With a welcome home like that after along (but fun, and productive) day, how can I not enjoy it?

3) This morning, my train got in fifteen minutes late. Yesterday, my line was disrupted by a lightning strike. This afternoon, two trains on another line collided. One of my favorite conductors retired and another switched lines. Why do I have the funny feeling that my mass transit honeymoon is over?

Thus Spake Stella, and Open Studios Results

So we drove into Brookline today for Brookline Artists' Open Studios, during which I got four great collages by the very cool and very hospitable (as in he let my children eat most of his corn chips and mess up his son's magnetic art board) Fred Free. Specifically I got this piece, this smaller piece, and two others. I have a cool new office with huge, bare walls in need of some interesting things. Combined with some work that I have at home, and an old picture of my father in the loading dock of the warehouse my grandfather built, I can get a nice little office gallery going. Oh, and Abby Whileshenaps, the award-winning artist who happens to be the love of my life, whose studio is located two feet away from my side of the bed and who is the mother of my children, is supposed to make me a bird. Someday. Ahem.

Anyway, on the way there Roxanne dozed off after Daddy sang some Passover songs, and Stella (who will answer inquiries as to her age with a hearty "Two In April!" and queries as to her mission with an emphatic "destruction!") held forth with the following story:

"Once, there was a dragon, who ate one hundred waffles. The people all went down the hill to see daddy get off the train. Um, the end."

Abby and I listened respectfully, and did not laugh out loud. We are still trying to understand the subtext obviously embedded somewhere in all of this.