Further dispatches from beyond the Alleghenies

My car topped 100,000 miles this weekend.
They’re tearing down the Commodore building, the 19th Century red brick facility I went to Junior High in, in my hometown, and I am disproportionately angry about it.
Mackie is putting my iPod up to his ear and saying “hello” right this second.
I brought Owen to a preschool orientation last night, which pretty much blew my mind. There’s nothing of the baby left about him, nothing at all.
My in-laws are surprisingly pleasant to live with. Wait, that came out wrong. What I mean is, I am surprised that living with one’s in-laws can be so pleasant. I knew they were nice people, but you know how it is when you move in with someone, anyone: you wait for the other shoe to drop. So far it has not.
I just read a collection of essays by Sarah Vowell which made me very sad that I do not live in Chicago and can’t write essays.
Owen, despite a solid nine months of pirate mania, is staunchly informing me that he would like to be a firefighter for Halloween. This does not detract from the ongoing pirate mania, but rather makes it more confusing for his mother.
I was awakened at 6:50 a.m. by, of all things, a tornado siren, which made the possibility of falling back asleep a joke. Furthermore, there was no tornado.
Pittsburgh’s North Hills appear to be able to reroute geography like an alien in a Douglas Adams book. No matter which way you turn or which direction your compass takes you, there is Route 19.
I will never understand hills. Nor will I ever understand roads that are not laid out in an even grid format. This is what growing up in the Northwest Territory will do to a person.
I have, and have had for a week, a hangnail on my left thumb.
It’s a special treat for my kids to play in the dirty-clothes basket.
I’m in the mood for vodka sauce.
When Mac isn’t playing in the dog’s dish, he’s unraveling my yarn. I wish he’d decide what animal he wants to be.
From the Unfair Files: I’ve encountered two roofing crews in the last two days. One was a pack of very strong-looking Amish guys in straw hats and blue pants putting the roof on a barn at a farmer’s market. The other is a pack of fat, belching, U-shirt wearing men putting the roof on the neighbor’s house. The fact that I didn’t have sunglasses at the farmers market, much less dark mirrored ones behind which I could gaze at length at the hot Amish roofers with nary a qualm, hurts my heart. And the fact that I can hear the boorish burps of the men next door from within the house hurts my heart also. Life is so very unfair.

August 26, 2008 | Filed Under daily grind, pittsburgh | 4 Comments

Moving on. Have a piece of Settlement Pie

Thank you, everyone, for all the very kind words on my last post. My up-time is very short these days, but I hope to be able to thank you all personally soon. It really means a lot to me.

And now for something completely different.

Good bye, blue house:

We closed on you yesterday. You were perfectly adequate. Also, you are where my babies came home from the hospital, where they cried through the night and where they got their first teeth and where Owen learned to walk. I am going to miss the place where those memories were born.

Hello, new house:

Picture of new four-square house here, which I took down after a while

You look beat to hell and you have a funny smell about you, but you came at a good price and you are in a killer neighborhood. In less than a week, Iain and I are going to buy you and scrape out your insides and paint you: you will be “redd up,” in the local vernacular, and then a week or two after that we are going to move in and a whole slew of new memories will be born.

August 23, 2008 | Filed Under house, pittsburgh | 7 Comments

Still fighting it

The last week has been emotionally wretched.

Last Thursday I attended the funeral for my cousin Jake, who was five years old when he was killed in a car crash in New York state. My brain still can’t wrap itself around the fact of it; I feel as though my head is an empty room with a one-way mirror, and behind that one-way mirror is something so terrifying and awful that I can’t look directly at it. It’s an awful reality no matter what, but the fact that he was my cousin, and that he was so close in age to my son, makes it monstrous.

Last week my family and I drove to Peekskill, N.Y., to be with my extended family, to represent the family at the wakes, and to stand with the rest of the town in grief and to pay our heartsick respects. The whole town seemed to rise up together for this, and I seemed to be related in one way or another to every person — and there were hundreds. It made me feel a part of that town, in a way, despite the fact that I never lived there.

It also made me feel separate: the fact that I never lived there. I am related to them, share an ancestry and genes with them, but don’t share a history. My mom and dad moved away to follow their fortunes before I was born. Now that part of the family and I share some history, but it’s history of the worst sort; it’s the worst thing to come together over. A morbid family reunion. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” we would say to each other at the wakes, forcing a laugh: aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, first cousins once removed …

And now the time for immediate grieving is over, and I am back at my mother- and father-in-law’s house in Pittsburgh, and I am still not feeling like I have come to grips with anything at all, except for one thing. Last Wednesday, I sat with “Aunt Tina,” my aunt Nancy’s sister, at Nancy’s house between wakes, eating New York Style pizza and sharing memories about Jake. She told me this: she unabashedly spoiled that boy every day of his life, and gave him whatever he wanted. Coca cola was an especial favorite of his — he called it Red Soda — and she never held out. “And do you think I regret that now?” she asked me. Her eyes were watering. I shook my head. “I don’t regret spoiling him for one minute,” she said. “Not for one minute.”

It’s a funny thing to take to heart, but I did. At my parents’ house for a visit, in memory of Jake, I allowed Owen to have Cocoa Puffs for lunch and a Spongebob Squarepants marathon all afternoon. Then he had Doritos for dessert and ran around the house in his pajams or even in the altogether, shooting imaginary pirates with a toy pistol, for hours on end. Normally I would require proper clothes, a healthy meal, and a minimum of imaginary ordnance fired, but if you could see how happy those little things made him! They are his Red Soda.

I don’t know if Jake died for a reason. It’s so nonsensical, so utterly unfathomable, that I think you kind of have to believe that he did. For my part, I have to thank him, and Aunt Tina, for a timely lesson: my kids aren’t pint-sized burdens, they’re bundles of joy. Wiry, slobbery little packages of happiness. And I’ll enjoy letting them gorge themselves on sugar and less-than-PC games if it means logging a few more of those toothy grins in my lifetime.

August 20, 2008 | Filed Under sappy crap | 18 Comments

The kids are all right

Cormac is officially walking. He also finally said his first word: “Uh-oh.” As you might imagine, that gets repeated a lot around here.

He also picks up my cell phone, flips it open and says “hello!”, then wanders around with it glued to his ear until I remember the cell phone = cancer story in the Post Gazette and snatch it back. He will eat anything you hand him, including raw vegetables from the garden and blackberries picked from the side of the driveway. He enjoys splashing in the toilet when I’m not looking and throwing tantrums if either of us leave the room.

Owen is, as you may have guessed, a pirate. He battles bad guys, sails the briny seas, fights bad guys, rescues assorted family members from “sea meepers,” duels bad guys, and captures a lot of gold treasure. He doesn’t eat much besides cereal and grilled cheese sandwiches, though the lure of ice cream has been enough to get him to finish his vegetables a time or two. He likes to wear shorts, his “superhero” tie-dyed t-shirt, and what he calls his “pirate shoes,” which are Old Navy flip-flops printed with the Jolly Roger.

Both of them are a handful, no doubt. I just plucked a dead worm out of Mackie’s mouth and made Owen stop using the broom as a weapon. But they’re holding up marvelously well during this transition, and I gotta give them a hand for that.

August 10, 2008 | Filed Under kids | 5 Comments

Reporting live from the north hills

I found the public library! And it has wifi! I am a happy woman.

So I’m still not entirely sure how, but we did it. We’re officially here. We moved all our worldly possessions into the 22-foot rental truck, drove 300 miles west, and unloaded them all into a (rather sketchy) 10x20 storage unit in the sticks here in Pittsburgh. By ourselves, with no help, because I think we thought our marriage needed a challenge or something. This morning I have dockworker hands and my arms feel like stretched spaghetti, but we’re all very happy. Now the hard part’s done. Well, part of the hard part.

We found a house we like (intellectually, anyway), an American Foursquare (I looked it up) in a picturesque small town about half an hour from my in-laws. It was an estate sale, where the previous occupants had been a little on the Methuselan side of things. The latest updates look to be a kitchen and bath circa 1956. The backyard is sea of peat moss. The paint is peeling and the gray aluminum siding is coated in grime. The carpets are: dark green. Did you catch that? Dark green carpet AGAIN. Guess what’s getting hauled out the minute we get possession. The house has three wee bedrooms and only one bath, and a kitchen just big enough for me to turn around in but not to cook. There’s an oven the size of my head in the wall and a fold-down counter top. The faucet is growing some sort of hard-water stalactite and the wallpaper, if I remember correctly, is patterned with chickens.

But no matter! I heard that real estate is all about this thing called location, or so they say. So we made sure to find the very best part of town, where the rest of the houses easily sell for a third-million or more (that’s Big Ticket out here, in case you’re from Baltimore ), and looked for something in our laughably tiny price range. And this is it. So with a little guidance from my father-in-law, we’re going build an addition next summer. OK, Iain’s going to build it while I take pictures. An addition will give us a master bedroom, an eat-in kitchen, a second bath and a first-floor laundry. It pays to be related to people who do this kind of thing for a living and know what they’re talking about. And if you get rid of labor costs, and build your own cabinets, then you really just need to cough up the money for 2x4s and drywall and shingles and whatnot. So it should be a pain in the ass but not too expensive.

Ha. Typing this out is funny. If I were reading this on somebody else’s blog I think I would probably laugh at their big dreams, which will surely be dashed in about July 2009. But not ours! We’re really going to do this. But before we do build next summer, we’re just going to make the place livable for the meantime. When we close (at the end of August), I’m going to pick up a few gallons of neutral paint, some white enamel, and a floor sander, and then I’m going to tear out those awful carpets and stomp on them.

August 6, 2008 | Filed Under house, pittsburgh | 13 Comments

So long, and thanks for all the crabs

Tonight will be our last night in Baltimore. What I will miss the most:

our friends on the faculty of the high school, who were nearly always up for poker
my coworkers and friends at the Baltimore Sun Media Group, who understand why some things aren’t done, and why some things must be
The awesome local people I met in real life through this blog, who introduced me to quite a number of delicious eateries, drinkeries, and quirky points of interest, as well as being righteous dudes and dudettes
Sonia and Ethel, guardians of the Lower Level, who helped me out of jams and made night work a cheerful proposition
the checkers at the Mars on Joppa Road, the grocery store we’ve been going to every Saturday afternoon for the last six years
Governor O’Malley, his sleeveless shirts, and his guitar

I’ll miss Baltimore the location, but mostly I’ll miss Baltimore the people. (and, as Iain says, I’ll miss the way yinz guys say “hon.”) We’ll be back out to visit soon. Meanwhile, keep an eye on things out here for me, ‘kay? I feel sort of invested in this place after six years.

August 4, 2008 | Filed Under auto-categorized | 8 Comments