It's November!

It's November, and that means it's time for turtlenecks and warm socks and flannel sheets, three of my favorite things. In our family, November also means birthdays--three of them. One of the first things Steve and I discovered about each other during my freshman year at Westminster was that we shared a birthday. It was an odd coincidence that maybe helped us together at first. And it was kind of fun when we were dating, but later on it started to feel a little less fun. You know how it is when you're a kid: your birthday is your special day. There's a present on your bedside table when you wake up, you get to take cupcakes to school, there are birthday cards in the mail when you get home, your mom makes your favorite dinner, and then there are more presents and more cake. For that one day in the year, you are celebrated. Granted, some of the birthday hoopla wanes with age, but your birthday is still your own special day every year--except when you share it with your husband. You might think a double birthday would mean double the celebration, but in our case, the two kind of cancelled each other out. Think about it: Who makes the cake? Who hangs balloons and streamers? Who plans a special dinner? It was hard for the kids, too, at least when they were younger--there was no parent to help them get ready for the other parent's birthday. So our joint-birthday always ended up feeling a little more like an anniversary. Fortunately, our first child joined our November birthday club. For a while, we thought he might arrive right on our birthday, but he took his time and claimed his very own special day. So although Steve and I don't usually eat cake on our birthday, we happily share Ben's a few days later. Over the years, I've slowly gotten used to sharing my birthday. In fact, sharing a birthday, especially a November birthday, seems to suit Steve and me. November, with its grays and browns and leftover yellows, is a subdued, understated month--tucked in there between bold, golden October and merry, red-and-green December. Steve and I, with our November-ish personalities, fit right in. I'm not sure how we'll celebrate our birthday this year--something quiet and subdued no doubt--but we'll do it together as we have for more than thirty years. And these days, I wouldn't want it any other way.

Halloween

I loved candy as a kid, and for me, Halloween was all about the candy.  In addition to the treats in my Halloween bag, our town had a Halloween parade every year; one year when my sister, brother, and I went as  Snap, Crackle, and Pop, we won a prize, but everyone who even entered the parade got a giant Hershey bar.  There were other good things about Halloween, too: pumpkin carving and a black and orange Halloween dinner at home--usually sloppy joes and carrot-raisin salad.  Some years there were parties with spooky decorations and bobbing for apples, although once I made the mistake of going as a cornstalk, and no one knew I was there.  But aside from that misstep, Halloween was pretty enjoyable, but even with all the candy, it was never my favorite holiday. When my kids were young, we had fun with costumes. The three of them were Captain Hook, Peter Pan, and Tinker Bell on Em's first Halloween. Another year the boys were Ice Miser and Heat Miser from The Year Without a Santa Claus and Em was Little Red Riding Hood thanks to her fascination with Into the Woods. The year we bought our house on Eagle Street, we had big Halloween costume party to thank the friends who had helped us move. When the kids got older, their costumes got less elaborate, and they didn't need us to take them trick-or-treating anymore. At the time I didn't feel too sad about letting go of that part of their childhoods; it was kind of a relief not to be sewing Halloween costumes at the height of the semester. And I'd never really liked the darker side of Halloween--all the blood and gore and zombies and horror that are part of the holiday. So I didn't think I'd miss celebrating Halloween when the kids were grown and gone. But I do. I feel a little melancholy during Halloween week when my only celebration is a homemade pumpkin spice latte and a handful of toasted pumpkin seeds. Last year, Steve and I didn't even carve our pumpkin, we just scooped the seeds out.  And we sure don't dress up in costumes to host or attend Halloween parties; we no longer play spooky sounds when we answer the door to the dozens of trick-or-treaters that flood Eagle Street. It makes me wonder, are we on our way to becoming like one of those old couples who lived on my old trick-or-treat route, the kind that handed out stale popcorn balls and mushy apples or pencils or dimes? Or even worse, the kind that turned off their porch light and pretended they weren't not home?  I'm pretty sure we won't, and here's why: I love buying Halloween candy. I choose my assortment carefully and shop early--that way Steve and I can nibble away at Almond Joys and Kit Kats, and Hershey bars for a couple of weeks before Halloween arrives. And even then, we are strategic in our distribution--we give out the Skittles and Nerds and Lifesaver Gummies first, saving the chocolate in case the trick-or-treater turnout is low, and we end up with leftovers.  So despite our lack of Halloween spirit, I think we're safe for now because, for us, Halloween is still all about the candy. Anybody want a peanut butter cup?

World Series

Every year when the World Series rolls around, I am transported back in time to the early 1970's when I was growing up just north of Pittsburgh.  I remember bringing my little green transistor radio along with me to piano lessons, so I could listen to the playoff game while my brother was taking his lesson. Our crabby piano teacher scoffed at me, but I sat out on her sunny cement patio and cheered on Roberto Clemente and the rest of the Pittsburgh Pirates. They won the World Series in 1971. The next year they lost the National League championship to Johnny Bench and the Cincinnati Reds (my younger brother's favorite player and team). Less than three months later, the Pirates and their fans lost something far worse than a championship. When Clemente's plane went down on New Year's Eve in 1972, I was stunned and heartbroken. I was twelve years old and hadn't yet had much experience with death, especially not with the kind of death that takes away a vibrant, healthy ballplayer in the prime of his life.  My diary entry for January 2 reads, "Dear Diary, The whole country mourns the famous Pittsburgh Pirate Roberto Clemente.  He died on a mission of mercy. Maybe someone could replace him as a great ballplayer but no one could replace him as a man . . . I hope no one ever wears Roberto's number again (21). I just can't believe he's dead."  Baseball was never the same for me after that. Oh, I cheered on the Pirates through the rest of the decade and celebrated when they won the World Series again in 1979.  But I never quite got over Clemente's death and the realization that bad things happen to good people even when they are in the midst of doing good things. I didn't like finding out what a scary and unpredictable place the world was. But maybe that's not the only lesson to be learned from Roberto Clemente's life and death; maybe the more important lesson is to make the most of the time you're given--play hard, take care of others, and leave behind a legacy of hope and goodwill.  So next year when the World Series rolls around, I'll be remembering Roberto and reminding myself to live a life that matters. And if the Pirates are playing, I'll be watching . . . 

School Lunches

Our little elementary school had no cafeteria, so if you weren't a "walker," you carried a lunch box, paid a nickel for a little carton of milk, and ate in the classroom. I had a Peanuts lunch box and matching thermos. In those days, thermoses had glass liners, so they didn't usually last as long as the lunch box; if you banged your lunch box around a little too much on the way to school, you'd find shards of broken glass mixed in with whatever you had in your thermos. Most days my lunch box contained a peanut butter sandwich wrapped neatly in waxed paper, but once in  a while I agreed to bologna on squishy white bread with Miracle Whip. In the days before blue ice cold packs, my mom froze water in an old Bactine bottle and tucked that into my lunch box in hopes of keeping my sandwich cool until lunchtime. To go with my sandwich and milk, I had fresh or canned fruit and something sweet for dessert--usually cookies, sometimes little cans of pudding, or if I was really lucky, a Hostess Ho-ho! I loved those little foil-wrapped rolls of chocolate cake and white filling. To make mine last longer, I peeled off the outside layer of chocolate and ate that first, then I carefully unrolled the cake and ate it as slowly as I could. Our elementary school was barely a block from our town's main street, and kids who had money and a note from home got to eat "over town" at the Amber Grill. Eating in town was a rare treat in our family since extra dollars for hamburgers, fries, and a vanilla coke were few and far between.  But every once in a great while, usually when my dad was in charge of the lunch packing for some reason, we would unwrap our sandwiches and see a woven potholder tucked between the two slices of bread along with a dollar and a note giving us permission to go to town for lunch. Part of the fun of eating over town was stopping at Kenny Wilson's candy store on the way back to school for a pack of Sprees or a strip of Zotz candy to keep in your desk and nibble on during the long afternoon hours. Field trip days usually called for bagged lunches (no lunch boxes), and I suppose I usually took my lunch in a plain brown paper bag with my name printed neatly on the front, just like everyone else did, but one time--maybe it was the year my grade got to go to Old Economy--my mom decorated the front of my bag with a garland of flowers.  I loved that bag, not just because it was pretty and festive, but because my busy mom took a few extra minutes to make something special for me to remind me she would be thinking of me when I was on my field trip. It was the same with finding a potholder sandwich and a dollar bill in my lunch box on days my dad was in charge of things. He could have just given us the dollars and notes in the morning, but instead he took a few extra minutes to do something only he would do and made a memory that would last a lifetime. Of course I didn't know it at the time, but those school lunches were doing more than filling my stomach--they were etching a lifelong place in my memory, and they were teaching me about the kind of parent I wanted to be.

Signs of Fall

Signs of fall are all around. It's moving-in weekend for SUNY Fredonia students, and the Fredonia Farm Festival is in full swing. Quiet summer nights have given way to the loud voices and late-night laughter of our new student-neighbors as they make their way home from house parties and bars. On my way to the farmers' market early this morning, I saw the tell-tale beer cans nestled in the grass and the first few colored leaves on the sidewalk. Although fall is my favorite season, these early signs of fall are bittersweet. If fall is coming, that means summer is ending. And the end of summer means our last child will be leaving for her last year of college. It means the house will soon feel too big, too quiet, and too empty. It means taking baby spinach and baby kale for green smoothies off my weekly shopping list and adding non-vegetarian entrees to our weekly menus. It means my girl won't be perched on the other couch doing her nails or making bracelets while we watch Mad About You or Gilmore Girls. It means I won't see her ponytail swinging as she heads out for a run. It means she won't be making us laugh at the dinner table or on the tennis court. It means we have to get used to being two again, instead of three or four or five. We've been sending kids off to college for nine years now, but somehow it never gets any easier. How can it? How can we stop missing our kids when they are not with us? My mom is eighty-one, and she still misses my sister, my brothers and me.  She treasures letters, phone calls, and visits and wishes they were all more frequent.  So maybe it's something you never really make peace with, you just handle it as gracefully as possible and keep your door and heart open.  For everything there is a season.

Cape May

The first time we went to Cape May our kids were six, four, and one. One-year-old Emily spent most of the week asleep in her little umbrella stroller, but the rest of us fell in love with the Victorian houses and the little shops, with Sunset Beach and Bodacious Bagels, and especially with the sun, the sand, and the ocean! We returned the next summer, and then four more times over the next twelve years. We always went with some (or all) of my family--sometimes renting a house together and sometimes getting adjoining motel rooms. Some of our fondest memories are from those Cape May vacations--despite years when it was cold and rainy or when the water was too full of jellyfish to swim or when half the group had the stomach flu. To me there's something almost magical about a beach vacation, and I've been missing the ocean. After a seven-year dry spell, we are headed back to Cape May. Before long we'll be packing all three kids (now twenty-six, twenty-four, and twenty-one) and all our beach gear into our good old minivan to make the long drive to the Jersey shore. When we get there, we'll be cosily sharing one hotel room--tightly equipped with two double beds, a sofa bed, and a cot, so we're hoping hard for good weather and cheerful moods! I know things will be different than they used to be: Bodacious Bagels is no longer in business; my kids won't have their cousins to hang out with; Steve and I won't have my siblings and their spouses to laugh and talk and walk with; my mom won't be whizzing by on her bicycle. But I still can't wait to get there. I can't wait to see the mighty Atlantic Ocean and the brightly colored houses of Cape May again; I can't wait to take early morning walks on the quiet beach and spend afternoons reading in the sun. But what I'm looking forward to more than anything is having our little family together again for a few blissful, uninterrupted days.

Heavenly Hash Cake

Although we only spent a couple of years in Muncie, Indiana, we picked up a lot of things in that little community that we've carried with us ever since. It was there I learned to knit. There I fell in love with Little Kiddles. There we learned about candy strings. And it was there my mom acquired her recipe for heavenly hash cake.  For those of you who have never had it, heavenly hash is a fudgy chocolate cake topped with a layer of marshmallow cream and then with creamy chocolate frosting. It quickly became a family favorite. It was almost always my sister's choice for her "good report card" treat. My mom made it for church picnics, for family reunions, and for the fancy coffee hours my dad used to host for his university students. When there was a pan of heavenly hash cake in our house, all was well. The heavenly hash cake recipe is one of the oldest in my recipe box, and I used to make it fairly often. But then, for some reason, I stopped making it. In fact, until this past week, the last time I made it may well have been for my middle child's 7th birthday. That same dear child just celebrated his 24th birthday. He came home for a visit a few days after his birthday, and the day before he arrived, I found myself pulling out the old recipe to make a belated birthday/4th of July heavenly hash cake.  As I was spreading the thick chocolately batter into the pan, the comforting, familiar smell sent me hurtling back through time and space to the kitchens of my childhood. The next day when the cake was finished and my boy was home, I took my first heavenly bite, and once again, all was well.