Blanket Fort

If my thirty-something daughter is Generation V--for Veg--then my twenty-something son is definitely Generation Y--for Why Bother? He lives at home, goes to college two blocks away, has one of those dogs that he plays with but Mommy feeds and walks. Although he can cook a five-course meal, complete with candles and wine, he's just as likely to pop down to the kitchen and ask winningly, "Is there any awesome food?" His room is ordinarily dominated by electronics, used for doing his engineering homework, gaming, watching political news, and keeping track of his stocks. But this week the entire room has become a blanket fort. Will he ever grow up? and if he does, will I be able to tell?

Itty Bitty Coffee Eclairs

I've had coffee éclairs on the brain for some time, and today I finally made them. I was taking them to a party, so I made them really small. Eclairs can be messy if they're more than one bite--not a good thing when you're standing on an expensive carpet, wearing nice clothes and trying to balance your snacks and glass of wine in a crowded roomful of possibly-tipsy people. For the party, I alternated them on a tray with equally-tiny cream puffs. That's a demitasse cup in the photo, if you want to get an idea of the scale.

The shells for éclairs and cream puffs are made from exactly the same dough, a simple pâte à choux (that's French for "cabbage paste"). The recipe is simple and foolproof: bring a cup of water and six tablespoons of butter to a boil in a heavy saucepan, then take off the heat, add a cup of flour and stir it up. Next add four egg yolks, one at a time, stirring well after each addition. Stir the whole thing a minute or two more over a medium flame to evaporate excess moisture. Then you just pipe the pâte onto a buttered baking sheet in whatever shapes you want. My éclairs were less than two inches long, and my cream puffs were an inch or so in diameter. (They do grow a bit in the oven.) To get that size, I used a pastry bag with no tip on it. You could also make cream puffs by just dropping blobs of dough onto the sheets with a spoon. This recipe made 75 little baked shells.

I baked these at 425 degrees until they were light brown and crisp--about 20 minutes perhaps. Then I filled them with pastry cream (made from scratch the proper way, with a double boiler and four more eggs, but you could use vanilla pudding if you didn't want to bother or were afraid; do it wrong and you end up with runny sauce or else scrambled eggs).

I frosted the cream puffs with icing made from melted Ghiradelli dark chocolate thinned with a bit of cream, and the éclairs with an icing made from confectioner's sugar, cream, and a bit of espresso powder. If you want them totally authentic and a little smoother and prettier, make your own fondant instead. It's a lot more work and tastes exactly the same.

I Hate Balloons

Somebody had a party, and this is what's left. A mess. I hate balloons more than I can say. They're tacky. They're scary when they burst in your face. They can kill. (Balloons cause more choking deaths than any other toy.) And even if you have bad taste and don't care about your own kids, careless disposal--as illustrated in this photo--poses dangers to wildlife. Birds get tangled in the strings and ingest the latex. Whales and other marine animals eat the latex, too. And as festive as a bunch of balloons is supposed to be, there's nothing more pathetic than a pile of deflated balloons stuck to a rusty fence. Yuck and double yuck.

Memento Mori

The worst night of my life took place when I was 11 years old. The doorbell woke me, and as I lay in my bed in the dark, I heard the deep voice of a man, followed by the screams of my mother. An officer was reporting to her the deaths of her sister and brother-in-law in a horrific auto accident. Their two children, my beloved cousins, were in critical condition, in separate hospitals as a result of the triage of the numerous victims. That was in 1961. Over 50 years later, the fallout from that accident still affects my family.

My aunt Cora was already a grandmother when this accident occured. She had eight brothers and sisters living. But my grandmother--her mother--never got over the loss of this child. Babu, as we called her, was a Polish immigrant who didn't speak English or work outside the home. One of her newly-arrived cousins, according to old country tradition, got permission from the funeral director to view the closed caskets before the wake and snapped some memento mori images of the horribly disfigured corpses. These he gave to my grandmother. Where she hid them, nobody ever figured out, but frequently she would be found in her bedroom, weeping uncontrollably, and we knew she had been looking at the pictures. Other than cursing that Polish relative, for over forty years no one ever spoke of the accident or of my aunt and uncle.

These days we know a bit better. There's no virtue in that rigid silence. My poor cousins were deprived, not only of their parents, but of the many happy memories of them we might all have shared, and of the healing and consolation which speaking about them and that horrible night would have brought. For most of her life, my girl cousin blamed herself for the accident, because she had wanted to go on the excursion which turned out to be fatal. Decades passed before she learned from older family members that her parents had planned the trip before she even mentioned it. Nobody even knew the guilt she carried in her heart, because everyone was too busy "sparing" her the difficult memories.

British Columbian college professor Cathy Sosnowsky has lost, not one adult child out of nine, but all four of her children. One, before birth, to abortion. One, a gregarious and well-adjusted teen, to accident. Two troubled adopted children to the streets. (The latter are alive, but estranged, and one is in prison.) She coped the only way she knew how, by writing about it, all of it. First poems, then this book called Snapshots: A Story of Love, Loss, and Life.

The title is a literal one. Sosnowsky has assembled over 50 family snapshots, and she organizes the book around them, talking about each one in turn. The pictures start before the children are born and continue after they're gone. The story zigzags from Canada to Europe and back, to pretty much all over the world as the author seeks the "geographic cure." Although we're treated to intimate details of the kids' lives, it's not just a story about them, but about an entire family with very complicated dynamics.

Writing probably saved this woman's life...or at least her sanity. And her book is useful to us, perhaps, too. The stories of others help us to piece together our own stories. Written stories are especially useful because writing allows the opportunity for reflection and organization which speech does not. Everyone has experienced some loss, whether of life or health or love or ambitions.

Sosnowsky currently conducts writing workshops internationally, focused on grief and healing. Her personal website is http://cathysosnowsky.com/ What I admire most about this woman is her courage in putting on paper, for the whole world to see, not just the sweet and sentimental stuff, but the gritty stuff, too. Her mistakes; her shortcomings: it's all in there. If you want to heal yourself, that's what you have to do: come clean. Writing's a bitch. If you don't believe me, try it yourself.

Sign of Spring: Snowdrops

Saw spring flowers outside for the first time this year, in the Rice's side yard. The last time I wrote about snowdrops, I had just gotten back from Lyon. March 30, 2006. I said about all I have to say on the subject back then. Good luck sign for me.

Park Update

One thing I've learned from studying demographics and statistics is that interpreting trends can be dangerous. If it was 80 degrees the day before yesterday, 81 degrees yesterday, and 82 today, I might conclude that by December 31 it will be 215 degrees, with no relief in sight. But of course that's ridiculous. Looking at a much larger stretch of the graph, we see that temperatures cycle up and then down again, over and over. The further we step back, the larger the context, the more accurate a prediction we can make about the weather, or the population, or anything else.

That's one of the reassurances I'm always giving the doom-and-gloom people. Sometimes it seems that most everyone I know believes that everything is getting worse--the economy, the environment, the educational system, teenagers' taste in music, you name it. Oh, and the world is going to end in 2012. I'm pretty cranky myself these days, and could probably use some of my own advice to just chill.

This morning I walked around the block with the dog, circumventing Armoury Common Park in the process. I was delighted to notice a young man wearing a bright red t-shirt (think: gang color) and lots of gold bling--a kid I know to be homeless and on drugs--industriously picking up trash all over the park and neatly bussing it in the cans. He caught my eye and gave me a cheery wave.

This evening I walked around the block with my dog, circumventing Armoury Common Park in the process. The park was empty and tranquil, as it should have been at that late hour, the gates closed with big chains and padlocks near the sign that reads, "Park closed at dusk."

What's going on? Are the park denizens taking stewardship of their own space? Are the police actually patrolling? Has a park ranger put this overlooked little space on notice? Is the apartment management once again abiding by the maintenance covenant struck in 1977 between the city and themselves?

I don't know. And I'm not foolishly idealistic. But the sight of my gangsta homie picking up litter has lifted my spirits all day.

Messy Park

Armoury Common is a jewel-like pocket park on the corner of Spring and Pearl Streets in Springfield. It dates from the 70s, when the area was rehabbed with lots of HUD money. In an attempt to attract working people to downtown, a group of apartment buildings were renovated, tennis courts were added, and this park was built. The gentrification didn't quite stick. The apartments started accepting Section 8, the tennis courts became basketball courts, and the park got rather run down.

Two years ago, probably because a new federal courthouse was being built nearby, the park was completely renovated. I was happy to see that the original design elements (cobblestones, river rocks, gilded amillary sundial, funky old-fashioned streetlamps and benches) were kept. In Springfield, you always have to worry that stone- and brickwork will be demolished and replaced by concrete. But in this case, the original vision was adhered to.

New sod was laid, some bushes were planted, and a new irrigation system was put in to water the whole business. The pump in the fountain was repaired and actually turned on. The river rock basin was repaired, and the sundial removed, regilded, and replaced. A statue which had been languishing in a closed park was relocated here. When the work was complete, the mayor and assorted bigwigs showed up for a ribbon-cutting.

I've got my own ideas about what should have been done to this park (it's purposely not kid-friendly, for starters), but the effort was certainly better than nothing. Unfortunately, the space is rapidly going to hell again. And why wouldn't it? This park has a bunch of posted rules, but no enforcement. It's never locked or patrolled by park rangers, police, or Armoury Commons staff. The shady corners make it a perfect haven for drinking and drugging. Nobody in her right mind would take a lunch break here or bring kids to play.

Here's a photo of the corner of the park nearest to me. This was taken about four hours after a park employee cleaned up the entire area. There are two trash barrels within fifteen feet of this spot.