Massahoma, Oklachusetts

Donkeys, Peaches, and Subway Tiles

2010-07-19T21:19:00.003-04:00

It's hot in Oklahoma in the summer.

Might as well go pick peaches.

Yummy!

Or go pet a baby miniature donkey.

I want a baby miniature donkey.

But best of all is cooling off in our new bathroom.

Flurry

2010-03-21T12:19:00.004-04:00

Life happens. Storms happen. Raised planters get built, radish seeds and collard seedlings get planted, snow falls, kids get sick, parents worry about their kids and their seeds and seedlings they planted. Nasty garages get cleaned out. Parents get sick, city leaders debate where to put convention centers, basketball tournaments come to town. Companies build skyscrapers, other companies make plans to raze historic buildings, people get upset, Downtown Design Review Committees ask to take tours of these buildings, people get slightly less upset. Downtowns are the object of obsession and pride. People do their taxes and look forward to receiving first-time homebuyer tax refunds. First-time homebuyers who get huge refunds make plans to remodel master bathrooms. Kids go to the openings of Children's Zoos. It is nearly always better to be a parakeet in a Children's Zoo than a goat, which nearly always look terrified. To walk is nearly always better than to drive. Declarations like this keep people honest. Honesty is a wonderful thing. Wonder is a wonderful thing. Bloggers stay away far longer than they intended, then return to make a flurry of generalizations.

Here's what I mean:

Ice Storm

2010-01-29T09:33:00.002-05:00

An ice storm has immobilized Oklahoma City. There is a quarter-inch of ice on each little branch and twig outside, a condition which Emily tells me is beneficial to trees because the ice acts as a blanket. It's cold outside, but we're warm inside.

In other news, OKC got a huge shout-out in The New York Times on Tuesday. Check it out: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/realestate/commercial/27devon.html.

Science is Fun

2010-01-17T08:50:00.002-05:00

On a rainy, cold day in the Bible Belt we took Emmett to learn about science. Here he is seeing Bernouli's Principle being demonstrated. As you can clearly see in this video, Emmett interrupts the flow of air around the ball when he thrusts his hand into the air stream, thus disturbing the upwards lift force causing the ball to float in air. Next up: Venturi Effect, Torricelli's Law, and of course the Reynolds Number. (Thank you, Wikipedia).

Emmett Is Officially a Walker

2010-01-14T21:50:00.002-05:00

FYI.

The Incredible Adventures of Emmett in Oklahoma

2010-01-07T08:02:00.006-05:00

Hi, everyone. You wouldn't believe what I've been up to here in Oklahoma. Things have been moving pretty fast around here. Sometimes things seem like a blur. Other times they seem to move really slow. My favorite album is Vampire Weekend's debut effort. I like to dance to it. The picture below is from Christmas Eve, the night of the famous blizzard of '09.

Here are two pictures of me and Mama and Papa in the Blizzard. I like how our house looks in the background.

I learned how to play the piano. Here I am performing a duet with my cousin Josiah.

That Josiah. What a guy!

Uncle Dale! World's best babysitter!

We went on a hike in the woods. I really like birdies.

I saw some pretty horsies and got a far away look in my eyes.

I met a fat guy in a red suit and didn't know what to think.

We planted a tree inside our living room. I also learned how to work this sphere thing.

I learned how to play the guitar, too.

But perhaps most importanty, I turned one!

Gosh, that was already two months ago. I am fourteen months old today. Life is great so far.

Built-In Obsolescence

2009-12-01T07:27:00.004-05:00

Reading the New York Times this morning, I came across a few articles that spoke to a condition most of us have to put up with these days: obsolescence. The idea that all things, sooner or later (though probably sooner), becoming obsolete.

Look at Dubai. It turns out that until Dubai's recent debt trouble, homes that had been constructed a mere 3 to 5 years ago were routinely being torn down to accomodate newer projects. The city of Dubai reminds me of Shelley's famous sonnet "Ozymandias":

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Dubai is fast becoming such a "colossal wreck, boundless and bare" perhaps because it was built to be replaced. Built-in obsolescence.

That's why I took great pleasure reading about Cormac McCarthy's Olivetti typewriter up for auction. McCarthy, one of our most celebrated novelists, wrote nearly all of his novels, including three unpublished ones, over a span of fifty years on this humble machine. What writer today will accomplish such a feat on his or her laptop? I purchased my computer in 2005 and it's a dinosaur. I give it another 6 months before it goes belly-up.

Now, undoubtedly great literature gets produced on laptops and maybe even on handheld devices, too. But to read that McCarthy has written his masterpieces on a single, solid, sturdy, mechanical machine that has lived on and on is an inspiration. His novels mourn the obsolescences around us, acting as a chorus to question the values of a society that eventually destroys everything it builds.

For fifty years at least, McCarthy showed it was possible to buck this trend. And his novels, unlike Dubai or Ozymandias's ruins or even the Olivetti typewriter itself, stand the true test of time.

The Evolution of a Front Yard

2009-11-03T20:36:00.007-05:00

This is what the front yard used to look like--that is, after we tore out a gross, old, uneven, narrow, dangerous brick sidewalk.
Then we hired some dudes to bust up the concrete walk. We rocked the no-grass, no-walk look for a while, including during the Heritage Hills Home and Garden Tour. It was kinda embarrasing.
But last week, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights from 9 to 11 p.m., I went outside and dug this trench. Don't ask me why I did it like that. I have homeowner fever. I'm nuts.
When the hole was dug, we ordered a ton and a half of crushed limestone. Can you believe this is a ton and a half? Me neither. Will it be enough?
Hell yes, it will! Look at Emily spreading it like a champ.
Then I came and tamped it all down. Memories of taking care of my high school's baseball mound. I was the starting pitcher and it was my responsibility. We had a nice mound.
Emily was the walk's chief designer. She decided on a herringbone pattern. Very glad she did. She also laid the whole walk. Except for a stretch when our second cousins (aged 14 and 11) came over and we put them to work. Nothing like child labor.
Speaking of child labor...just kidding.
Ignore the camera strap and focus on the attitude. Manual labor is fun.
Making progress!
Finished! Except for the irregular pieces. We had to buy an angle grinder to do that.
Oh, and where did we get all these bricks? We didn't purchase a single one. No, instead we salvaged them from our property. They came from the old brick walk in front and from a brick patio in back.
Some of the bricks are older than the state of Oklahoma. This one was made in the town of Chandler. "O.T" stands for "Oklahoma Territory." How cool is that?! Again, ignore the damn camera strap.
A lot of interesting bricks here.
But wait...there's more! We landscaped, too!
We put a dogwood tree in the backyard...
...and watered all the plants, shrubs, and trees we put in the front.
Tada! We did this in one weekend. Two full days of work. Boy, were we tired.
But we are happy. The end.

Halloween Special: Surf and Turf

2009-11-03T07:32:00.003-05:00

Surf: Emmett "Lobster" Reynolds, born in Boston.

Turf: Josiah "Moo Cow" Daniel, born in Oklahoma City.

OKC House After (Though Not Completely After)

2009-10-10T10:13:00.004-04:00

OKC House Before

2009-10-10T10:03:00.005-04:00

Dan and Keira

2009-10-10T09:33:00.004-04:00

I'm back in Boston this weekend after two intense weeks in Hartford for work. We're on the East Coast for another week and half, and in that time we have big plans, and none bigger than attending Dan and Keira's wedding. But I'll be more than attending...I'll be officiating! Yes, Dan and Keira asked me to officiate (or "solemnize," if you want to get technical) their wedding, and I am honored to do it. After all, I did introduce them! Click on the link above and then check me out in the "Wedding Entourage" page.

Dan and Keira at the Beach:

In other news, we miss our new home. We can't stop thinking of all the fun things we want to do to it. As promised in a previous post, I have some "before and after" photos for you. Wait and see the difference.

Our 101st Post

2009-09-24T22:08:00.004-04:00

Rather than talk about how cool it is that the MAPS 3 proposal contains plans for a streetcar (yes!), and rather than mention how cool it would be if (assuming it passes in the December vote) OKC hires United Streetcar (the first American manufacturer of streetcars in 58 years) to build them, and instead of talking about how nice it is that the MAPS 3 plan includes a big central park and plans to finish bikes trails and sidewalks across the city, and even though I'd love to talk how the sun is out after three weeks of rain, or how we're heading to the East Coast for three weeks tomorrow (so Emily and Emmett can visit her folks and so I can attend a program in Hartford, CT), I think I'll stop rambling in this, our 101st post on Oklachusetts, and just give the people what they want: Mr. Emmett!

August in Oklahoma

2009-08-30T07:46:00.007-04:00

I apologize for the more-than-month intermission between posts. Oklahoma City has been hot and rainy, and until about a week and a half ago, we didn't have Internet access. Moving into a house built in 1919 and living for a month without phone, cable, or Internet is like traveling back in time. Of course if we had traveled back in time, our home would have been much newer, the floorboards would have creaked much less than they do now, there wouldn't have been a jungle to be tamed in the back and front yards, and presumably we wouldn't have had to spend a whole afternoon ripping up a poorly laid brick walkway or two days painting over a rancid shade of mustard yellow on our bedroom walls. We're planning a big "Before and After" photospread, so stay tuned. Of course, the "after" part of that spread should really be called "now," as in "Before and Now." "After" connotes finality, as in our work here is done, which it patently is not. We'll be working on this house for years and years. Nonetheless, we've accomplished a whole lot. You'll see.

In the meantime, some observations and a small collection of photos.

Working on a historic home is much like restoring a city slowly hollowed out by the forces of suburbanization. Our old home has 37 windows--9 in our bedroom alone. But only one of these 37 windows is in working order. The rest have been painted and caulked shut for years and years and years. Why? Because when air conditioning became available and affordable in the 1960s, people thought they'd never have to use their windows again. Honestly. They assumed that having cold air reliably blast through floor and ceiling vents to create a controlled climate would be an improvement over the transom window system, whereby during the night you open the top and bottom windows to simultaneously draw in cool air and let out hot air, and during the day you close the windows to trap in the coolness. Not the best way to cool a house, admittedly. Assuredly, HVAC works better, infinitely so. No amount of adverbs can qualify that statement enough. AC works exponentially better.

But is this any reason to destroy the functionality of windows? I mean, isn't one of the true pleasures in life lying in bed at night while a breeze drifts in through an open window? Couldn't they have just left a few windows in each room uncaulked? Why let newer technologies be the ruination of certain older ones that, though outdated, still retain some usefulness? It seems like the two ought to have found a way to coexist. Right?

Well I found a cruel answer to that complaint in the attic, where I discovered that that a PVC drain pipe for the HVAC unit had been fed, rather violently, into our cast iron sewage pipe by some thoughtless technician years ago. He had to find a way to drain the condensation created by the unit, and so he took a hammer and chisel and punched a gigantic hole into the iron drain pipe and stuffed his little PVC thingie in there, and voila! No condensation! (Nevermind that giant hole.)

Something like this happened to Oklahoma City. The streetcars were ripped up and replaced by buses that didn't run on time; downtown residents fled to the suburbs; and even though the suburbs lacked the foot traffic of the old neighborhoods, retailers fled downtown when the winds of urban renewal ripped up Main Street to build a galleria mall that never got built. In the name of improvement, of progress, the city suffered one blow after the other--the city regressed--until Mayor Ron Norick drew the line in the sand and put together MAPS I to restore the lifeblood to our city. That was 20 years ago. And look at this! We've moved to an old neighborhood that's 8 blocks away from my new job. I walk to work (on the days it doesn't rain) and on my walk I pass beautiful old homes that are a testament to good design and smart neighborhood planning. I miss Boston, but I'm glad to be back.

Some photos from the past month:

My First Full Day in Oklahoma

2009-07-17T09:38:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was my first full day in Oklahoma. It was full of excitement and adventure. I began my cross-country road trip in Boston on Tuesday morning and made it as far as Cleveland, OH, where I picked up my dad, who had flown in from a business trip in New Jersey. We were on the road at 5:45 a.m. Wednesday, and fourteen hours later, we pulled into our lake house in Ketchum, OK. We slept late the next day and were back on the road by 9 a.m. We cruised into Oklahoma City at noon on Thursday, July 16. We had covered 1700 miles in two days and four hours.

Highlights from the road trip include: listening to Kerouac's On the Road while being, um, on the road (I had forgotten what Sal Paradise says about Dean Moriarty: "My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry-trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent-a sideburned hero of the snowy West"); picking up my dad in Cleveland; seeing the sunrise over Lake Erie; realizing that my Rand McNally Road Atlas says that my new neighborhood is the "Don't Miss Drive" for Oklahoma City; trying to guess the population, square mileage, and capitals of each state; forgetting that Pierre is the capital of South Dakota.

My first full day in Oklahoma consisted of the following: eating sushi with my sister and nephew; opening up a bank account in a bank that looks like a space ship; going on a final walk-through of the house that will soon be our first house to own; getting caught in a flash hail storm; having to wait out the storm under a gas station awning with 50 other cars; braving the suddenly flooded streets on the way back to the bank for a cashier's check; discovering that the bank's power had been knocked out by the storm; going to the bank branch inside the Super Wal-Mart; getting a very large cashier's check from a Wal-Mart bank branch; running into an old friend buying dry ice at the Wal-Mart; fried okra for dinner; checking my email after three days of being away; learning that Steve Lackmeyer had finally written a story about Jeff Bezdek's streetcar proposal for OKC; missing my wife and son, who fly out on Monday.

I retired to bed at 10 o'clock and found an old copy of E.M. Forster's Howards End on my old bookshelf. The first two sentences struck me as apropos of my new life here: "It isn't going to be what we expected. It is old and little, and altogether delightful."

Today we close on the house. Pictures forthcoming.

My Last Day in Massachusetts, Part 2

2009-07-13T12:06:00.007-04:00

Inspired by Elisa Gabbert's poem "Last Days Home", I decided to take my bike on a farewell spin of Jamaica Plain the night before the movers came to pack up all our earthly belongings (that was Friday night; it's now Monday afternoon, and I'm typing this post from my Emily's parents' house, where we've been staying since Saturday). I brought my camera along to document my ride.

Here's my bike. It's an old Raleigh road bike that I converted into a fixed gear in the summer of 2005. I built the wheels (I even threaded the spokes onto the wheel hubs); I reworked the bottom bracket and the headset; I put on a new chain and replaced the gear cogs with a single, fixed gear. I put on an old Brooks saddle that snapped in two last weekend.

Elisa's poem has that fantastic final sentence: "Coasting—the bottom of / my pedals scrape the grass, and the whole world /
smells like sweet gardens, like California." I love how the penultimate line break makes it sound like she's saying she's coasting over not just the grass but the whole world. And I love the tonal ambivalence of "coasting": is she gliding purposefully toward her future, or is she drifting?

Elisa's "coasting" is interesting in the context of my Raleigh because, as any cyclist knows, fixed gears can't coast. Whenever you are on the bike and the wheels are spinning, the pedals are going around and around. One simply cannot stop pedaling and coast; the bike won't allow it. So the rider of a fixed gear always has more control of his bike: if he wants to slow down, he simply pedals more slowly; if wants to speed up, he pedals more quickly.

So, thinking about Elisa's "Last Days Home" and the idea of coasting vs. pedaling, I rode slowly around JP on Friday night to savor the neighborhood. I spun past the Victorian mansions and parks, the street lamps and bars, both feet turning around and around but never stopping.

My Last Day in Massachusetts, Part 1

2009-07-13T07:26:00.004-04:00

It's my last day in Massachusetts. Tomorrow morning I'll hop in my Honda Fit and head to Oklahoma to stake my claim. Call it a modern day land run. A lot has changed in the 120 years since the first land run, though some things remain the same. I may not be riding in a covered wagon, but it's opportunity and the promise of a better life that brings me out west. I am a pilgrim, a frontiersman. Call me quintessentially American. Call me Oklachusan.

In my first month in Massachusetts, in my first workshop at Emerson College (lead by the inimitable, infamous Bill Knott), I encountered the following poem by Elisa Gabbert, a young woman fresh from Texas. I'm pretty sure Bill offered Elisa $10 to buy this poem from her, which is a high form of praise in Bill's world. I wrote Elisa to ask if I could publish it here, and thankfully she agreed. She had never revised it and had forgotten all about it, but this poem has always stuck with me. I love how uneasily it combines nostalgia for the past and hope for the future, as seen in the coasting of the bicycle (this poem reminds me why I love riding bicycles). Elisa is a first-rate poet and a dear friend, and I can't think of a better way to suggest that endings are also beginnings than to shut up now and give you this excellent poem.

***

LAST DAYS HOME
by Elisa Gabbert

I feel like there’s something in my hands,
a present: I’m going all the places
that I’ve never been, and all at once. The other

end of America, and across a whole
ocean. Already this city (its disproportionate
dimensions, cranes like dinosaur skeletons)

feels temporary. I bike around the blocks
I know, saying hello and goodbye. It’s early
morning, and the air is still waving

from yesterday’s heat. A glitch in time.
Summer. I can almost see my brother,
in Prague at night, drunk, trying to find a place

that serves absinthe. In Venice, the first peach
he ever ate. Or walking Berlin in his long coat
and deep snow, grinning at the new adversity.

Being older, he did everything first. When
he was sixteen years old, he pressed two pennies
for me at the top of the Empire State. Does he

remember that? I still wear them at my neck,
and I remember everything. I saved every postcard,
though he never said enough. Just Having fun.

Amazing here. I miss you guys. Missing home.
Now that I’m leaving, maybe I will too.
This road, it wouldn’t be here in a year,

how it becomes the sidewalk, which
becomes the park. The light starts to edge
through the haze. No one thinks this place

is beautiful, but it’s close to that sometimes,
to something striking, like a good lie. The wind
blows the fountain all over my face

and the street. Coasting—the bottom of
my pedals scrape the grass, and the whole world
smells like sweet gardens, like California.

What to Put in Place of a Highway

2009-07-07T22:09:00.008-04:00

Oklahoma City is moving the stretch of I-40 that runs downtown, dubbed the Crosstown Expressway, five blocks south of its current location. The new highway will be sunk below the roadway to allow for pedestrian bridges and roadways and the development of a large urban park. A boulevard will take the place of the current highway, one that Mayor Cornett hopes will be the gem of the City. The plan has garnered lots of national press, but as city planner Jeff Speck points out in his recently completed walkability report on Oklahoma City (skip to "Mistakes About To Be Made" starting on page 38), the boulevard as it's currently envisioned will accomodate far more car traffic than it needs to and will therefore inhibit pedestrian activity precisely in the area where the City wants to encourage it the most. Speck recommends that OKC use Commonwealth Avenue Mall in Boston's Back Bay as a model for how to build a boulevard. Will the City take Speck's advice? Or will they insist that it's disanalogous since Commonwealth Avenue wasn't originally a highway? (It was originally a marsh. Literally.)

Thank goodness for The Infrastructurist. Check out the post from Monday, July 6th, entitled "Huh?! 4 Cases of How Tearing Down A Highway Can Relieve Traffic Jams (And Save Your City)." The title kinda says it all. Kudos to Seoul, Portland, and San Francisco for replacing highways with structures that actually encourage people to experience their cities in some other way than from the dashboard of their cars.

Oklahoma City leaders, are you reading The Infrastructurist? Are you getting this?

Oh, and so we're true to our name here at Oklachusetts, I would be remiss not to mention the Rose Kennedy Greenway that replaced Boston's Central Artery after it became the Big Dig.

So, if Oklahoma City's goal is to move the cars someplace else and to encourage mixed-use development where pedestrians, cyclists, cars, buses, streetcars, and businesses can all coexist and commingle and connect (and any other co- word you can think of), then please don't replace a highway with a boulevard that is a highway in every way but its name.

UPDATE: Architects, urban planners, civic leaders, entrepreneurs, and creative people everywhere: if you are wondering what we can do with the bones (the steel beams and concrete slabs) of I-40 once it's relocated, perhaps you should check out these worthy projects: the High Line Park in NYC and the Big Dig House in Lexington, MA.

Red, White, and Blueberries

2009-07-06T08:04:00.011-04:00

This Fourth of July, for the second year in a row, we spent our holiday with our favorite farmer and his wife. This year our friend Anne came, too. Emily met Ward when she worked as a grower at Lindentree Farm in 2004. He quickly became her friend and mentor, teaching her not just how to drive a tractor, how to identify the different signs of pest infestation and plant disease, and how much, when, and where to plant. He also taught her that although farming is backbreaking work, there are many small pleasures that come with working the land, like discovering that swallowtail caterpillars, beautiful enough in their own right, will shoot out bright orange horns to ward off predators if you gently squeeze them and that nothing is better than tasting a sun-warmed melon hacked open right in the field. She learned that picking the first tomatoes of the season and gathering handfuls of fragrant basil come along with picking rocks out of field in March and pulling weeds from between tiny carrot shoots on your stomach for hours.

Ward and Nora rent a house that abuts one of the trails that Henry David Thoreau walked when he worked as a surveyor for the town of Concord in the 1850s. Across the road is Hutchins Farm, where Ward now works, which has been designated farmland since 1775 but has been worked by humans for much longer than that. Plowing those fields, Ward has discoved many Native American artifacts--spearheads, axes, flint shards--some of which are ten thousand years old. He works on hallowed ground.

Ward gave us a tour of the farm before dinner. Walking past the apple orchard, plucking blueberries off of 30-year old bushes, hiking down into a valley striped with rows and rows of onions and summer squash and scallions, I could not help but think that this rivaled any fireworks display. A squash blossom is just as colorful and explosive. And man, you should have tasted those sugar snap peas! Bang!

The Fourth of July is our nation's time to reflect on and celebrate our political and cultural independence, and to take pride in the fact that our country still is a beacon of hope for people everywhere who aspire to freedom. Spending the Fourth on a farm seems an appropriate form of celebration: those who choose to work as farmers enjoy a certain kind of independence from 9-to-5 cubicle employment. Farmers come close to achieving what Thoreau himself hoped to achieve by moving to Walden Pond: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

But Thoreau didn't live in the woods forever (and he was only a mile away from town!), and farming is more about dependence than independence: our dependence on the land and nature for survival; our dependence on the sun and the rain and the earth to provide the raw ingredients and energy necessary to grow our food; our dependence on culture and tradition; our dependence on one another. On the day we celebrate our independence as a nation, I think it is also fitting to celebrate and honor those things upon which our lives depend.

Riding to Work in the Year 2009

2009-07-01T21:32:00.009-04:00

I'll miss commuting to work on the T.

Even in the dead of winter, waiting on the platform in the bone-jarring cold,

without my gloves again, I appreciated the opportunity to ride the T.

Even when the subway car was too full to sit, too full even to stand,

obnoxious perfumes of strangers in the morning giving way to sour sweat of strangers

in the evening, teenagers who listen to their music too loud and talk too loud (I always listen for The Flaming Lips' Riding to Work in the Year 2025),

all the faces reading and talking and sitting in silence, daydreaming, thinking,

the train delayed without explanation and all you want is to be home

but you overhear a man in khakis and duck boots tell his lady friend

(more interested in Teen Vogue) about the porcini salad he paid too much for--

despite these annoyances, the T still beats traffic jams.

I like driving to work without traffic jams--I don't like having no choice

BUT to drive. Riding the T can be an event. Riding the T can be banal.

For daily commuters, the T (and perhaps the bus) offers

small moments of grace, if we're willing to notice them.

I snapped these photos on my cell phone camera between January and April 2009.

Battlestar Oklachusetts

2009-06-30T11:10:00.001-04:00

June is almost over, July is our last month in Massachusetts, and we've started packing for the big move. Today is my last day of work. It's been raining for two weeks straight, but every once in a while the sun comes out and steams up the city. The air is humid and heavy, and I wish it would stop hanging around and do something already.

*

Emmett has taken an interest in bubble wrap, cardboard boxes, and rolls of tape.

I, on the other hand, have not, and would much rather watch episodes of Battlestar Gallactica. Humanity has been suprise-attacked by the Cylons--brutal, sentient machines that turned on their human creators. The survivors jump around the galaxy on a fleet of spaceships looking for Earth while trying to avoid annihilation. At the end of Season 2.5, they've found a habitable planet hidden from their enemies in a nebula; against the audience's better judgment they decide to abandon their ships and inhabit the planet (New Caprica, they call it) that could become their permanent home.

*

Two nights ago, after we put Emmett to bed, Emily and I watched the first four episodes of Season Three, in which the humans manage to escape (barely) from Cylon captivity on New Caprica, but sadly the half-human, half-Cylon baby they've been secretly harboring is abducted. Later that night, Emily and I both had long, involved, vivid dreams featuring infants and exodi. I woke up in a sweat, disoriented by the drum of fan, and forgot that a month back we'd transitioned Emmett to the crib.

*

If you are ever on the cusp of a major life change, I recommend you head to the science fiction section of your local video store. The best movies and shows involve the violent and awkward collision of different species, mindsets, ways of life. A good sf movie is always apocalyptic in the sense that it shows one world ending as another begins.

*

Ridley Scott's Alien, despite all its stomach-bursting gore and its dark-corridor suspense, is really a long meditation on the consequences of reaching too far. You can't explore the deepest recesses of space without encountering a little contagion every now and then, whether this contagion is an 8-foot tall lizard that has acid for blood and will gestate its young inside your measly little body, or the soul-sucking greed that makes large corporations think their workers are expendable. And this contagion you pick up on your Odyssey home may just follow you for the rest of your life. You cannot overcome this contagion. You must transform it by merging with it. That's why the humans in Battlestar Gallactica were so keen on protecting their half-human, half-Cylon charge: life could never be the way it was before, so they knew that she was the key to their future.

*

Ray Suarez wrote a book called The Old Neighbood: What We Lost in the Great Suburban Migration: 1966-1999. I found it on the shelf as we were packing our books and have been flipping through it for a week or two. People left the cities in the 1950s thinking that a better life awaited them in the new communities being constructed on old farms at the edge of town. City life was vibrant and active but dirty, cramped, and dangerous, and life in the new suburb would be sterile but clean and spacious. Everything and everyone would look the same, they thought. There we can finally be free, they thought.

*

Free from what? Cylons?

*

Emily's parents threw us a Boston-themed going away party this weekend. Lobster bisque, Fenway franks, Harpoon beer, ice cream with Brigham's hot fudge sauce. People from all walks of our life here showed up: Emily's farm friends; our old barbecue crew; folks from Tufts and Emerson; neighbors, bandmates, cousins, aunts and uncles, former colleagues.

Amid all these humans, Emmett suffered a major case of "stranger danger" anxiety. For example, he cried every time he saw our friend Dan. Gee, I can't imagine why.

*

At the party a friend of mine I always see at Boomerangs, JP's thrift store, gave me a book he'd found there that reminded him of me. He even wrote me a little farewell note on the front page. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I'd donated that same book to Boommerangs not three days before. Sometimes the things you choose to leave have a strange way of refusing to be left behind.

*

In the first three seasons, all Jack from Lost wanted to do was leave the island, but once he left all he wanted was to return. The island is his Battlestar, skipping through time and space.

*

Is Boston the New Caprica we're fleeing, or is Oklahoma City the New Caprica we're fleeing to? Where is our earth? We may never find it. We take solace in the vessel that takes us from point A to B.

A Bird's Eye View of Population Density and Sparsity

2009-06-24T09:10:00.006-04:00

It's hard to see the forest for the trees. It's even harder to see the forest for the trees when the forest has been deforested. Translation: it's hard to see how dense or sparse a neighborhood is or has become when you are living in it. Sometimes you need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Or, in this case, you need to take a hundred steps up and look at the picture from above. This is where satellite imagery can help.

Inspired by Charles Benton's "kite aerial photography" (but not actually owning a kite), I explored Bing's maps page and discovered a cool feature: "Bird's Eye View" satellite imagery. Using this tool, I "Binged" nine of my previous addresses to see what they look like from the air. To me, the results reveal much about differing assumptions of how and where we ought to live, and how we ought to go about planning cities and neighborhoods.

Check them out. Two of these are in Cincinnati, three are in Oklahoma City, and four are in Boston. Can you tell which ones are which? The first reader to put all the right answers in a comment will win a free Oklachusetts sticker.

But also, I'm wondering if you agree with me that the most aesthetically pleasing neighborhoods from the air often have the sparsest populations on the ground (and if you read my last post, you'll remember how important I think it is to have densely populated neighborhoods). Some of these 'hoods look like they were designed mostly for the approval of plane passengers cruising overhead. One more thing: which of these places looks the most "family friendly"? What does this mean, anyway? Is it friendly to have to put your kid in a car seat whenever you want to go anywhere?

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We Want Density, Not a Thin City

2009-06-23T15:21:00.017-04:00

Recently I wrote a post about "walkability" in which I asked the readers of Massahoma, Oklachusetts to visit the WalkScore website to determine how walkable their neighborhoods are. Almost without fail, the addresses with the highest WalkScores were in cities with the highest population densities. This does not surprise me at all, because a high population density means more people concentrated into a particular area means greater demand for the goods and services that businesses provide, and this demand is more frequent and consistent because it can come in the steady form of foot traffic (as opposed to only coming by car), which means that land can be developed for other, more significant purposes than parking. High population density equals foot traffic equals consistent demand equals business development. Add it all up and you have thriving urban areas where people live, work, study, shop, and play. Population density is what drives mixed-used development. And as Blair Humphreys notes in his most recent post on imagiNATIVE america, streetcars can play a big part in the creation of this density and development.

Check out these numbers from the 2000 Census Data: of the three major cities I lived in (Oklahoma City, Cincinnati, and Boston), Boston has the largest population at 608,352 and the highest density at 12,172.3 people per square mile, while Cincinnati has the smallest population at 332,458 but the second highest density at 4247.2 people per square mile. Oklahoma City, meanwhile, has a population of 547,274 but a density of 833.8 people per square mile.

Let's put these figures into larger perspective. Of the 263 biggest cities in the US (cities with populations over 100,000), Boston ranks 21st, OKC 31st, and Cincinnati 56th. But when ranked by population density, Boston is 10th, Cincinnati is 76th, and Oklahoma City is 258th out of 263. I know Oklahoma City doesn't have the natural boundaries like Boston and Cincinnati have (the Charles River, the Bay, the Ohio River, etc.), and I know Oklahoma City went on what Steve Lackmeyer in his book OKC Second Time Around calls an "annexation spree" in the 1950s that saw its land area jump from 80 to 475 square miles by 1961 (today it covers 620 square miles and is the second largest major metropolitan area next to Jacksonville, Florida). I also know that this annexation spree happened at the same time Oklahoma City's extensive streetcar system and interurban passenger rail service was being dismantled (today no such service exists, though many people are pushing hard to have streetcars included in MAPS 3). For an in-depth account of OKC's streetcar past, start with Doug Loudenback's "Okc Trolleys Part 1". For photos of downtown's long gone Interurban Terminal, see the spread at Rezone OKC.

I know these things, but I don't have to be an urban planner to realize that 258 out of 263 is absurd. The number isn't entirely accurate, since there is more rural square footage in Oklahoma City than urban square footage. But even if you deannexed the rural areas (and generated a political firestorm in the process) and thus reduced its total square footage, OKC's population density would still be lower than it would have been if not for four decisions that eroded the city's core:

1) Unchecked expansion of city limits;
2) Development outward instead of inward;
3) Disappearance of streetcar and passenger rail service;
4) "Clearance and Redevelopment" of the urban landscape through Urban Renewal (to see what was lost, check out these maps, courtesy once again of Blair).

If Oklahoma City had restricted its territorial growth, concentrated its development, and preserved its architectural buildings and transportation infrastructure, then we'd be in a different league right now. For the most part, this is what Boston did. But OKC didn't, and so every civic decision we make from now on must somehow address our critical lack of population density.

Stay tuned for some satellite images that illustrate this problem...and a reader contest!

Some Thoughts on Father's Day

2009-06-21T08:14:00.014-04:00

Fathers may not admit it, but they like to push their children in strollers or wear them in slings because it secretly makes them feel cool.

When I wear or stroll Emmett down Centre Street, whether I'm at the coffee shop or bakery or library or the bank, people gawk as we approach--little old ladies ooh and ahh, young couples give us puppy dog eyes and hold each other's hand a little tighter, tattooed baristas say things like "that's one good looking lad" without a trace of irony, and even homeless dudes forget to ask me for some spare change. Emmett is my instant attention-getter, my get-out-of-obscurity-free card, and when he's with me, I forget that my hair is turning gray, that my hairline is receding, that my back is killing me, and that I didn't get enough sleep the night before. I could weigh 250 pounds, be hungover in Vegas with a huge beard and two loser friends like that fat dude from The Hangover, but throw a baby on me and I'm pure box-office gold.

In fact, Emmett's kinda gotten to my head. I'm more than a little immodest when he and I are hanging out. Take this situation, for example:

Little Old Lady (who sees me standing in the aisle of the convenience store with Emmett strapped to my chest): Oh, how cute! How precious!

Chad: Thank you!

LOL: How old?

C: I'll be 33 in July!

Or this one: I'm walking down the sidewalk with a cup of coffee and I overhear a beautiful woman say to her friend, "Isn't he darling?"

Chad: Are you talking about me? Thank you!

Beautiful Lady (choosing to ignore me): Just adorable!

C (choosing to ignore that she's ignoring me): Thank you, thank you, thank you!

BL (who looks the other way as we pass, then whispers to her friend): I was talking about the baby.

Okay, so maybe most of the time they are talking about the boy and not the father. But yesterday, Father's Day, we were at a Building 19 looking for discounted Persian rugs, when an older gentleman, stooped with a cane, and I had the following exchange:

Older Gentleman: That sure is a cute one!

Chad: Thank you!

OG: Enjoy him because it won't be this way forever!

C: Kids grow up pretty quick, huh?

OG: Sure, but so do their parents! One day you'll be like I am!

So I am getting old and getting older by the minute. Good thing I have Emmett around to make me look young. And in case you think this is vanity or pride, please remember that this is Shakespeare-approved vanity or pride. Shakespeare tells us in his second sonnet that to have children is "to be new made when thou art old, / And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold."

Emmett Takes the T

2009-06-17T18:51:00.005-04:00

Emmett rode Boston's T today for the first time. Hard to believe that it took 7 months; I suppose it's because our little neighborhood of Jamaica Plain has everything we need on a daily basis (markets, cafes, thrift stores, libraries, community center, huge botanical garden, etc.). With another local mom and her daughter, we went to check out what the Boston Children's Museum has to offer babes Emmett and Eleanor's age. Eleanor has ridden before, and stood in Rachel's lap grabbing the pole with all the swagger of an experienced commuter. Emmett rubber-necked; there was so much to look at: people of all shapes and sizes and colors, scenery passing in a blur on the other side of the window, signal lights and advertisements and maps. He was in heaven.

I tried to verbalize to Rachel what it was that I missed so much about taking the T daily (I had been working downtown as a consultant, but was laid-off during my maternity leave). I suppose it constantly reminded me that I am part of a larger civilization. I had to share space with the rest of greater Boston's commuting humanity - come face to face with their quirks, their smells, their voices. We had to treat one another during that time with mutual respect and consideration; often it was even kindness. This is what some people hate about public transport. I say those people - the ones sitting solitary in their climate-controlled cars during rush-hour, and for whom public parks are never as good as one's own fenced-in private yard - have lost a little bit of their humanity. But then I'm prone to hyperbole.

The museum was hoppin' for a weekday. Their dedicated "Play Space" for children under 3 was filled with moms and nannies and their charge, and smelled not-vaguely like poop and pee. In the small infant area, for kids who can't yet walk, most everything was padded, and the walls were mirrored. Emmett ogled the surely-stressed fish in the plexiglass tank, and was nearly swallowed-up by the weird waterbed thingy...but mostly he and Eleanor fought over the cool toys that a thousand other kids before them had pawed and drooled on. It had to be great for their immune systems.

On the Beach, Looking West

2009-06-16T18:36:00.016-04:00

Ah, Cape Cod. That odd protuberance off the South Shore that gives our beloved state of Oklachusetts one half of its distinguishable geography (the other being its famous panhandle in the northwestern tip). Emily and I brought the boy down to the Cod (I think this sounds more interesting than "the Cape") this past weekend to stay a night at Emily's sister's new vacation home that she and her husband purchased with her father- and sister-in-law. The sister-in-law and her family stay in a small condo downstairs; Emily's sister, her husband, her father-in-law and his girlfriend stay in the larger home upstairs. Here we are hanging out on the wrap-around porch. One of Emily's brothers-in-law works at Harpoon Brewery, so we were having ourselves a good ol' time.

On the way Emily reminisced about her girlhood summers on the Cod staying with her grandparents. She recalled digging for quahogs (pronounced "cohog") with her grandfather, who spent so much time gardening outdoors, cigar in mouth, that his skin turned leathery tobacco brown. She and her sisters used the empty cigar boxes to hold toys and candy they'd buy at the general store in town. The dirt road leading to their house would crater after a rain storm, and the girls loved to investigate the puddles that accumulated. She remembers eating tunafish sandwiches and potato chips at the beach, playing board games at night while the grown-ups drank gin-and-tonics, and waking up to her grandmother cooking breakfast, the irrestistable scents of coffee, toast, and bacon wafting into the bedroom from the kitchen. Her dad was a teacher and her mother hadn't yet become a nurse, so they'd spend a week or two at a time like this, living at the decelerated pace that the beach and heat and small towns demand. When Emily was in college, the summer after her grandfather died, she lived on the Cape (that's what she calls it) with her grandmother and worked as a waitress at a beachside hamburger joint. The two ladies played a lot of cribbage and Trivial Pursuit, cooked together, and went to yard sales. They spent a better part of that summer sifting through discarded items of strangers' lives for a few treasures.

(I love yard sales. I knew I had found my woman when we discovered our mutual love for yard sales. Our very favorite possessions, most of our furniture, and a good deal of our clothing have come from garage sales, tag sales, yard sales, thrift stores.)

I also reminisced: about my summers at Grand Lake, how on the drive up from Oklahoma City my dad would tell us stories about famous shipwrecks like the Titanic and the Andrea Doria (which happened off the coast of Nantucket!) that seemed to last exactly as long as the car ride. How upon arrival I'd always run full speed down the ramp and bound off the edge of the dock to see how far I could dive out over the water. I recalled how our dog Molly could climb up the ladder from the water to our dock all by herself. How I learned from one of my older cousins to dive deep enough and hold my breath long enough, even with my life jacket on, to scare everyone around me; how I'd then grab at some poor unsuspecting person's ankles and yank them underwater; how all my younger cousins loved this. How my mother would take us to a local farm to buy blueberries, peaches, and corn. How she'd let my sister and me paint the concrete floor of the screened-in porch however we wanted. I remember sitting in that screened-in porch and watching the sky turn from grey to black as a sudden summer storm swept over us. I swear, when driving from Vinita to Ketchum, I remember seeing lightning strike up from the ground in one such storm. I lived at the lake the summers between my 7th, 8th, and 9th grade years and worked at a local marina as a dockhand, pumping gas into cabin cruisers and ringing up sales and eating one too many free Hot Pockets. My boss Fred gave all the employees nicknames: I was City. Sometimes after work, instead of walking back, I'd just jump off the gas dock and swim the three hundred feet home.

(It's safe to say that Emily and I share a love of yard sales and bodies of water.)

Emmett will be spending plenty of time at the lake when we migrate west in our covered wagon, but hopefully he'll spend sizeable chunks of his summers at the Cod. Here he is at the ocean for the first time, the Atlantic behind him, his whole life before him, a continent stretching out, all those memories to be made.

An Open Letter to OKC Mayor Mick Cornett

2009-06-12T15:52:00.009-04:00

Dear Mayor Cornett,

Thank you for your excellent service to Oklahoma City. I grew up in the city and remember watching you on TV and reading your column in the Oklahoma Gazette. I commend you on the wonderful job you've done so far, especially your work to combat obesity by "putting this city on a diet" and your creation of a website to gauge what the citizenry would most like to see on MAPS 3. I have lived in Boston for the past seven years, and so I chose not to participate in that online poll because I wanted it to be an accurate reflection of what the residents of OKC want. But recently my wife and I have decided to move our family (we have a seven-month old son, Emmett...you can see a few pictures of him on this blog) back to Oklahoma City, and we're proud to say that we've purchased an old fixer-upper in a historic neighborhood within walking distance of downtown. We move back in mid-July and can hardly wait.

The opportunity to own a home is only part of what is bringing us back to the city. We are also genuinely excited about the tremendous development that has occurred in the downtown OKC's various districts, including the Central Business District, Bricktown, Midtown, and Arts District, in the fifteen years I've been away. I've lived in some fantastic cities like Cincinnati and Boston, but I'm proud that Oklahoma City is making bold strides to compete with them on many fronts. What with our new NBA team and construction on the Devon Tower starting in October, I think we are poised to become the "Charlotte" of the next decade by seizing the nation's attention and imagination while drastically improving the lives of OKC residents. MAPS 3 gives us this opportunity--if we can get it right.

We need to make viable public transit and a "central park" in the Core-to-Shore development the centerpieces of any MAPS 3 ballot. Here's why. Of the proposals I've heard and read about--including the Convention Center, the river developments, and the State Fair center--public transit and a "central park" are the two components that will send the loudest and clearest signal that Oklahoma City is serious about being an important place to live and work while also positively impacting the city's inhabitants.

Most other cities our size or bigger with professional sports franchises have alternative forms of transportation that are quick and reliable. We only have our bus system, which, as I know from watching online the most recent City Council meeting over which you presided, is woefully underperforming by sending buses around only once every hour and by having too few routes to adequately cover the city. This urgently needs to change--and any transit improvements ought to start with improved and expanded bus service--but we also need to add a modern streetcar route to spur and concentrate development in our urban core. This is both what the Association of Central Oklahoma Government's Fixed Guideway Study suggests we do and what Jeff Bezdek's MTP website shows is feasible to do. We also need to use existing rails and rights-of-way to create commuter rail service to Midwest City. And we need to create rails and rights-of-way to forge commuter service between Guthrie, Edmond, OKC, and Norman. This plan is vital to our future growth as a city, but it will also improve the quality of our air, our roads, and our health.

Since I still live in Boston, I read an editorial by Marc Draisen in the Globe this weekend about the importance of saving the T from ruin. Apparently while taxpayers were spending $14 billion to fund the Big Dig, the T wasn't regularly maintained. Draisen claims that Boston must modernize its transit system now "in order to compete with cities that are building new transit systems in the South and West." Will Oklahoma City be one of these cities that gives Boston a run for its money? I sincerely hope so. I have ridden the T or my bike to work every day for the past two years, because it was easier, cheaper, healthier, and more pleasurable to do so than driving. If you build a transit system in Oklahoma City, you will retain and attract more and more people, like me, who prefer not to be completely car-reliant.

Core-to-Shore is becoming an essential part of MAPS 3, but it must feature a large and dynamic park at its center. I have seen what urban parks can do with a city's residents. I remember spending many weekend days hanging in Cincinnati's Eden Park and in the Boston Common. My wife and I were married in Boston's Public Garden.

As you can see, it was magical. Oklahoma City needs a place like this. People will use it and love it. Emmett and all his new friends will play there, go to concerts there, play sports there, go to arts festivals there. One day, who knows, maybe he'll decide to get married there.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to moving back in July and voting on MAPS 3 sometime soon.

Sincerely,

Chad Reynolds

P.S. Enjoy the deadCENTER Film Festival.

Top Blogs, Top Dogs

2009-06-11T15:25:00.009-04:00

Back on the subject of blogs, I was wondering what the Internet's top blogs are (as opposed to something else's top blogs, right? Cable TV's top blogs or public radio's top blogs). After a little Google search, I found this: Technorati's list of the top 100 blogs. You can rank them "by authority" or "by number of fans." Although I'm not exactly sure what "by authority" means (how do you determine or evaluate authority, anyway? Do any of you know, if so, please tell me in a comment!), I first ranked the blogs this way and discovered that number 16 on the list is a parenting blog ParentDish. Check it out. Spend a few minutes there soaking it all in. Notice the hot pink buttons and headlines, scroll of featured articles at top, the sheer number of categories, the scope of the site.

Honestly, what makes this site so great? Check out the current articles' headlines: "Planning a Road Trip? Stay Busy in the Car"; "Skipping Sunscreen--How Bad?"; or my favorite, the wonderfully titled, "Eggs." Is it on the Top 100 list because it aims to provide helpful tips and advice to parents? Does ParentDish achieve "authority" through its utilitarianism? In my book, the advice is too basic and the design too cluttered. It seems like a busy site for busybodies. Isn't it simply a reflection of its harried readers? And it has multiple contributors, making it seem more like a bad magazine than a blog.

I thought a blog was supposed to be a quirky, intimate affair, a place where a person with something to say can say it, even if it has not real purpose at all.

That's when I found this one--Dooce--and I said out loud, wow. It's number 24 on the "by number of fans" ranking, and I can see why. It's written by a woman in Salt Lake City named Heather B. Armstrong and this is from her "About" page:

This website chronicles my life from a time when I was single and making a lot of money as a web designer in Los Angeles, to when I was dating the man who would become my husband, to when I lost my job and lived life as an unemployed drunk, to when I married my husband and moved to Utah, to when I became pregnant, to when I threw up and became unbearably swollen during the pregnancy, to the birth, to the aftermath, to the postpartum depression that landed me in a mental hospital. I'm better now.

Holy smokes, that's hot writing folks. Real spunk. This is better than advice on cholesterol in "Eggs" any day. Check out this post on mucus plugs and prepare to snort your coffee out your nose. And just look at those comments! 452 for this post alone! I think I'll add her site to the column at left.

Hey, what do you think of the Top 100 list in either ranking mode? Any pleasant surprises there? Any big disappointments? What's the top dog of the top blogs?

Sleep's Roller Coaster Ride

2009-06-09T21:16:00.009-04:00

This morning I drove a van of students to Six Flags. It was raining, the kids were listening to the radio and talking, traffic was moving slowly, I had slept terribly the night before, and I was doing a lot of thinking about the good old days.

I used to pride myself on my ability to survive on five or six hours of sleep. Back in the heydey of Ara Vora, just after I'd graduated from Emerson with an MFA and was teaching high school English in Waltham, I'd practice two nights at week with the band, sometimes until midnight, wake up at 5, write a poem or two for an hour or so, eat breakfast, shower, and head off to work at 7. Emily and I lived in a Somerville apartment that was 325 square feet and cost $795 a month, utilities included. We'd just gotten engaged and were excited about our future. Emily was in graduate school at the time, shuffling between Medford and Chinatown from class to class, writing papers on sustainable agriculture and doing group projects on mouth-watering projects like the history of food. Life was busy, life was good. Ara Vora had at least two shows a month. I slept five hours a night and took naps on the weekend.

But Emily, no matter how busy, always got her solid nine hours of sleep. She had to, or else her day was ruined. When she got pregnant and everybody told us to get our sleep before it was too late, I teased her that she wouldn't be able to hack the sleep deprivation. I, on the other hand, as was well documented, could make it on five hours a night, no problem. Fatherhood, in the sleep department at least, would be a breeze.

I was a zombie the first two months of Emmett's life. A braindead upright grub with arms and a beard. We had a system to get through those nights: Emmett cried for milk; we both woke up; Emily sat in her chair; I picked Emmett up from our co-sleeper and brought him to Emily; she started nursing; I passed out for fifteen minutes; Emily woke me; I grabbed Emmett, brought him to the changing table, changed his diaper, and brought him back to Emily for the other side; I passed out; Emily swaddled him and put him back in the sleeper between us; we went to bed for another hour and a half to two hours; we did it all over again.

One time, somewhere in one of the above steps, I put Emmett's diaper on inside-out. And when asked in the middle of night, I routinely misinformed Emily of the time, because my eyes refused to work from weariness (she had taken her contacts out). No matter how hard I tried, no matter how hard I squinted, I couldn't read the clock, and I have 20-20 vision. In this sorry state, I honestly don't know how I got anything done. But somehow, in my zombiedom, I managed to teach The Turn of the Screw, Ethan Frome, The Great Gatsby, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in a span of two months.

It now occurs to me that each of those works features a male character who shuffles around his environment like a ghost.

But then something happened: Emmett suddenly started sleeping longer and longer, until one night he went for almost seven hours. And around his fourth month we instituted a bedtime routine: book at 6:15; bath at 6:30; nursing at 6:45; bed at 7. The bath looked something like this (though this was snapped tonight):
And for about three months Emmett slept like it was his job, only waking up once to nurse. For a little while, I started to feel like the old Chad. The one who could survive on five hours of sleep (the key is getting uninterrupted hours of sleep). I should have known it was too good to last.

Emmett quit his regular sleep job about two weeks ago, and most nights since he's been waking up every two hours or so, crying and wanting to snuggle and nurse. Maybe it's that he's teething (two bottom teeth and one coming in on top!) or that we've started putting him down in his crib; maybe it's that he can roll over onto his stomach but doesn't quite like being there yet; maybe he's experiencing a major growth spurt. Whatever it is, our idyllic sleep routine isn't.

A few parents we know have shared with us their success "sleep-training" their child: after three nights of letting their child "cry it out," their son or daughter learns how to "self-soothe" and begins to sleep through the night. Others we know think it is unrealistic or unnecessary for infants to soothe themselves, and they don't mind waking up as often as possible to tend to their child's needs. As far as I can tell, whether you believe in sleep training or attachment sleeping is the ultimate litmus test, a true measure of one's parenting style, kind of like how one's stance on guns, taxes, and abortion determines one's political stripes. Every parent insists it's a "very personal decision"--which just shows how supercharged the topic is.

Emily doesn't like the idea of not tending to Emmett's needs, even if only for a while, because she doesn't believe it's possible to spoil a child of seven months. But she does think that trust can be violated. And so she doesn't want to sleep train. But for a while, I, the guy who never really cared about sleep, tried to convince Emily to let Emmett cry it out. Now I've changed my mind. I don't want to sleep train anybody.

I changed my mind at 10:15 this morning, when we pulled into the parking lot of Six Flags in Agawam, psyched that it had finally stopped raining, only to discover that the park had been closed for the day due to inclement weather. I felt like Clark W. Griswold. I told the security guard (who sadly didn't have the humor to pull a John Candy and say, "Sorry, folks. Park's closed. The moose out front shoulda toldja.") that I'd give him a thousand dollars if he took us on a roller coaster. But of course he didn't (and I didn't pull a bb gun on him), and so we sat in the parking lot while the lead chaperone made a few phone calls, and watched four or five other buses of school kids come in, find out the bad news, and leave. Dave got off the phone and told us that the Six Flags website says that it stays open during inclement weather. He couldn't believe it wasn't open when the rain had stopped. He figured it was a cynical business move, that the rain had scared everyone but the buses of school kids off, and that the park would have taken a hit if it had stayed open for the day. Our plans had been foiled by weather, desperation, or greed--all forces much bigger than we and our petty concerns.

And that's when I realized Emily was right. Life is unpredictable. Sometimes parks open in the rain, sometimes they don't. Sometimes kids sleep through the night, sometimes they don't. Sometimes you just gotta roll with the punches.

We stopped for donuts on the way home. And this was almost as good as riding a roller coaster.

Blogs, Parents, Highways, and Parks

2009-06-06T21:52:00.011-04:00

I've been thinking a lot about blogs lately, about how they look, what they do, what they're for. I still haven't figured them out. Does anybody know how many blogs exist at this moment? I bet just now about three hundred more got started.

Some people run little online family photo albums on their blogs. Oklachusetts kinda does that. See? Here are two pictures of Emmett attempting to pick up a pea between his still-ungainly-though-suddenly-not-decidely-ungainly thumb and forefingers.

And here is a picture of Emmett wearing a decidely-too-big-but-strangely-not-decidely-overwarm-given-it's-no-longer-winter wool cap that belongs to his daddy.Other blogs, like Sweet Juniper, have reimagined the family blog genre to find a compelling narrative that transcends any individual blogger's concerns and attains something like the universal. By chronicling the turmoils and triumphs of being a parent and spouse in the ruins of modern day Detroit, Jim (the guy who runs Sweet Juniper) has captured a certain zeitgeist that I think many Americans are feeling right now: a curious mix of anger at the asswipes who got us in this mess and a real fear for the future that nonetheless can't destroy the hope that we can make it right for our children. By it, I mean our cities, our country, our world. Funny how reading a blog can give me that hope.

What does Oklachusetts add to the blogosphere, I wonder? I like to think it synthesizes two ways of looking at the world and puts forth a new way. Or perhaps it shows that a blue and red state have more in common than people realize, despite very real differences (though I haven't discussed politics all that much). Maybe it's a meditation on how the hopes and dreams a parent has for a child are similar to the hopes and dreams a citizen has for his or her city.

Parents are like city planners who only have a few chances to get it right. What buildings will they raze, what buildings will they keep? Will they build a highway through the center of town, or will they build a central park?

Jamaica Plain Isn't "Fit" for Hondas

2009-06-03T16:54:00.007-04:00

If you own a Honda Fit or Civic and you reside in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, you better watch out: some unscrupulous hooligans who have a thing for hubcaps are coming for your wheels, and there's nothing you can do about it.

I should know. They nabbed my wheels on Monday night.

On Tuesday morning I awoke to find that my 2009 Honda Fit Sport wasn't where I had parked it the night before. In its place were two six-foot long parallel gouges in the concrete, as if someone had removed the wheels of my car and and dragged it along the pavement. Apparently, the hooligans broke the driver's window, rifled around the car, removed the wheels, then dropped the vehicle unceremoniously to the road. It didn't matter that I had locking lug nuts. Apparently, my car looked something like this.

I never saw it because the police came around at 6:41 a.m. (according to the police report I picked up from the station later in the morning), called a tow truck, which then dragged my once proud car across the pavement and onto its flatbed at 7:30. All of this while I'm in the kitchen, naively typing away about mall rot in America. At 8:15 I make the discovery, put in a call to the cops, and confirm that my car had been vandalized and then towed.

It's sad that I'm a victim of crime. What sadder is that I'm not the first--or even the second, third, fourth, or fifth--person this has happened to in the past six months. The police, the auto body shop, even the insurance company all informed me that there's been a spate of similar larcenies...almost all of them occuring in Jamaica Plain. The auto body dude said that one woman brought her Civic in six times, all six times without wheels. But mostly it seems to be happening to Honda Fits.

I was walking home from work today (I didn't drive...but not because I didn't have wheels: because I can walk, ride my bike, or take the T to work), and I passed a dude in a 2008 Fit with locking lug nuts on his rims. I knocked on his window to say that those were smart but that determined thieves could get around them. He said that in February they had hit up his ride, taking all four wheels and smashing a window. He lives in Fenway. He now has two sets of locking nuts, an alarm system, and he pays to have it garaged.

So it's happening all over this city. And go back to the link above (this one) and scroll down to the last comment, by Sue: you'll see it's happening all over Seattle, too, and other comments there show it has happened recently in Florida.

Why? Because young dudes with nothing better to do than imitate the "Fast and the Furious" like to "soup up" their Hondas. Check out this provocative post to some forum or this ridiculous step-by-step.

Wow. I just wanted the car because it got good gas mileage (averaged 42.5 miles per gallon on a trip to Vermont and back!), was cheap, had tons of safety features, looked cool, drove well, and was a hatchback. Looks like I got more than I bargained for.

Who knows? Maybe that this happened on the day that GM declared bankruptcy is divine punishment for owning a foreign car. And how very strange that the rental car my insurance is paying for is Chrysler.

But, hey, Honda owners, if this has ever happened to you, leave a comment here saying where you live and how the hell you prevented it (if you did) from happening again.

P.S. Emily just reminded me that the car is not "mine" but "ours." So it should read, "They nabbed our wheels on Monday night" or "confirm that our car had been vandalized and towed." Good point, honey. Anyway, you drive it more than I do.

P.P.S. One interesting note I forgot to mention. When I took my car in for an oil change about 3 months ago, the mechanic told me about the Jamaica Plain/Honda Fit problem and advised that I put on a set of locking lug nuts. I did what he said, and sure enough that very night some moron took off a few of the regular nuts until he hit the locking one, gave it a few angry cranks with his ratchet, and gave up. For the past three months, Emily and I thought we had the crooks beat, and we pointed to the now slightly rusty locking nuts as proof. Guess we thought wrong.

Disbelief at the Mall

2009-06-02T07:05:00.004-04:00

Sunday's Times featured an op-ed graphic detailing the demise of the shopping mall. Turns out that sales have dropped sharply from the first quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009. Once mighty heavyweights like J.C. Penny, Macy's, and Dillards have seen their sales drop 5.9%, 9.5%, and 12% respectively. High-end retailer Saks suffered a 28.7% loss, and Abercrombie & Fitch tumbled 23.5%. Not surprisingly, budget shops like Kohl's and Wal-Mart have dropped by 0.4% and 0.7% respectively. In fact, the only stores to experience gains are Burger King at 1%, Radio Shack at 5.6%, Cinemark at 6.2%, Family Dollar at 8.7%, and CVS at 9.7%.

When the only thing going at the mall is a cheap electronics store, a pharmacy, a dollar store, and a fast-food joint, it's not surprising to see that mall movie sales have risen. To the long list of woes people are trying to forget in a bucket of popcorn and a dark movie theatre we can now add the demise of the mall. People must suspend their disbelief somehow. It used to be that malls suspended our disbelief that our main streets had lost their retail. Malls were our fantasylands.

Over at OKC Talk, there's a thread that's almost a year old about the "End of Crossroads Mall," the once formidable shopper's paradise between Oklahoma City and Norman. In the past year the mall has lost all its major tenants (Macy's, JC Penny, and Steve and Barry's...Steven and Barry's? That's a "major" tenant?) and is just barely hanging on. In tones ranging from nostalgic to defiant to downright silly, contributors to the discussion thread have been suggesting alternative uses for the property when it inevitably folds. Suggestions run the gamut from outrageous (world's greatest indoor paintball facility, OKC Talk headquarters, a prison) to respectable (an educational center) to promising (mixed use development based on Denver's Southglenn) to the inspiring (a stop on a future interurban rail line).

Who knows what Crossroads fate is, but an op-ed from today's Times might provide a clue. In "Rethinking the Mall" Allison Arieff talks about her experience serving as a juror in the Future Image Architecture Competition for the mall of the future, sponsored by the International Council of Shopping Centers:

Surely, I thought, the entries will reflect the extent to which business as usual — i.e., massive anchor retail tenants surrounded by thousands (even millions) of square feet of specialized yet mass retail, in settings only accessible by car — cannot possibly continue....Despite near-non-existent consumer spending, the declining popularity of shopping as America’s favorite pastime and the chilling effect foreclosed homes in housing developments are surely having on nearby malls, most entries in the ICSC competition responded less to the future of the shopping mall than to the glory days to which we’ve recently bid adieu. I was struck by how little attention entrants paid to things like sustainable architecture, alternative transit or changing consumer attitudes about consumption.

Arieff did find a few bright spots, though. According to her, the best entries--Wilson Yard by Fitzgerald Associates Architects; Retail to the People; and FutuRetail 2020 by CommArts--all revolve around what Arieff calls a "walkable, mixed-use community"--a sustainable vision of stores distributed throughout neighborhoods and accessable by foot, rail, and bike, instead of being set apart from them and accessable only by car. CommArts' "Crossroads City" will be a "social center" that will not only sell stuff, but will also grow stuff, make stuff, produce energy, and train and teach people.

In other words, the mall of the future won't be a mall. The mall of the future will resemble the main streets of yesteryear. That's a future I'd like to see.

What's Your Walk Score?

2009-05-26T21:27:00.004-04:00

"Walkability" is the new buzz word in real estate, but how do you measure a neighborhood's walkability? A great new website, WalkScore.com, helps you determine just how walkable a neighborhood really is, but how does it define walkability? From the "How It Works" section of the web site:

Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking.

Public transits options, street width and block length, street design, safety from crime, and weather are just a few of the factors not included in Walk Score's calculations. Nearby amenities such as grocery stores, cafe, schools, churches, libraries, etc., are the only factors, with amenities closer than a 1/4 mile receiving the maximum number of points, fewer points awarded for those between 1/4 and 1 mile, and no points for those farther away than a mile. Type in an address, watch the site tally a home's walk score, and see if the home is a "Walker's Paradise," "Very Walkable," "Somewhat Walkable," "Car-Dependent," or "Car-Dependent (Driving Only)." The site operates on the assumption that the greater a home's Walk Score (that is, the greater the number of amenities within a mile radius of that home), the more inclined a person is to walk (thus leading a more active lifestyle), and the more desirable that home will be to potential buyers.

Here are my Walk Scores:

I grew up in a neighborhood in Northwest Oklahoma City called The Village, a name that might suggest pedestrian heaven; in reality, it wasn't so divine, but it wasn't so bad either. A decent Walk Score of 54. There was a square nearby, with a library and grocery store and even a Church's Fried Chicken and my school.

My first off-campus apartment in tiny Lexington, VA, had a slightly improved score of 60. Of course, I drove everywhere.

After college, I lived in two different apartments in Cincinnati, OH: one in a hillside area called Mt. Adams overlooking downtown and the Ohio River and distinguished by ornately painted Victorian homes. People called it "The San Francisco of Cincinnati." It had a Very Walkable score of 83. The second was in the much more urban neighborhood of Mt. Auburn, which also sat on a hill overlooking downtown and had a Very Walkable score of 86; the difference was this apartment was owned by an eccentric art collector who kept a Picasso and a Pollack hanging in the upstairs unit. Too bad I had a 40-minute commute by car to work.

Then I sold my car and moved to Boston, which bills itself as "America's Walking City." My first apartment, near Berklee College, was a Walker's Paradise at 100. My second apartment, just down the road on the border of South End and Roxbury, and three doors down from a funeral home, was a real downer by comparison: it had a 97. I next lived in a Cambridge home that had a 92 and then a Somerville apartment with a score of 89. My current pad, in Jamaica Plain, has a score of 91. My god, have I really lived in five apartments since 2002? Yes, and the lowest one with a Walk Score of 89! Boston has spoiled me. Thank goodness for that. We have a car now, but we only seem to use it on the weekends.

So, readers, if you exist, if you care, I'm curious to know what your Walk Score is. Do me a favor and visit WalkScore.com, type in your address, and then leave a comment here at Oklachusetts saying where you live (no addresses, just the general area) and what your Walk Score is. And if walkability is as big a deal to you as it is to me, then take few minutes to sign this petition to tell Congress to support walking, biking, and public transportation in the 2009 Transportation Bill.

Walking With Child

2009-05-22T21:17:00.003-04:00

Making Streets Matter Again

2009-05-20T19:03:00.008-04:00

What makes a street a good street? Is it wide lanes or is it wide sidewalks? Does a street exist to facilitate and expedite the flow of automobile traffic, or is it a public space to be shared by cars, cyclists, buses and streetcars, and pedestrians? Is a street merely a means to get you from point A to point B, or is it an end in itself, a destination, a place to see and be seen?

This question has been weighing heavily on my mind ever since I took my girlfriend, who was born and raised just outside Boston, to Oklahoma City one Christmas. We hadn't rented a car at the airport, and so when we wanted to purchase some last minute presents, we decided to walk to the mall...only to discover that there were no sidewalks in North Oklahoma City. We trespassed on lawn after lawn as people in SUVs sped by with quizzical looks on their faces. Why, I wondered, was it so hard to get around without a car? (I also wondered if this woman would break up with me; we married instead.)

And I've been thinking about this conundrum--why do certain communities become car-dependent while others don't?--a lot lately. Turns out I'm not the only one. It seems that from New York City to Oklahoma City, urban planners, city officials, and concerned citizens are raising serious questions about the way we've planned our streets since the 1950s. It's about time.

Take, for instance, today's article in the New York Times about how a radically transformed street in Brooklyn might represent the future of street design in America. Replacing a vast and barren swath of concrete are bike lanes, a median, trees, narrower car lanes, and wider sidewalks. This is a street you'd want to saunter down. This is a street you'd want to promenade down, stroll a boy named Emmett down. This is a street for which the French poet Baudelaire invented the term "flaneur." And it could have remained a simple and uninspired and single-purpose thoroughfare forever.

And in Oklahoma City, influential new urbanist Jeff Speck was hired to examine the City's street grid and make recommendations to improve its "walkability" after Prevention Magazine ranked OKC the poorest city in America for walking in 2008. Guess which city was number 1? Cambridge, Mass.

Oklachusetts, indeed.

But hiring Speck to reexamine its streets was a bold move by OKC, one that didn't go unnoticed by New York City magazine Fast Company or on this St. Louis blog or on this Rutgers University blog.

Of course, bloggers with ties to Oklahoma City, like Daily Oklahoman report Steve Lackmeyer in his excellent OKC Central, Blair Humphreys (son of former OKC mayor Kirk Humphreys) in his excellent imagiNATIVEamerica, and Casey Cornett (son of current OKC mayor Mick Cornett) in his excellent Joy in Mudville all recognize the symbolic and practical importance of Speck's consultation with the City.

And just tonight PBS began its amazing new documentary called Blueprint America by investigating the differing development strategies of Portland, OR, and Denver, CO. Can you guess which city allowed sprawl and built a highway ring and which city built a modern streetcar system and bike lanes and developed an urban development zone to curb sprawl? Every American should watch this documentary, especially people who live in car-dependent communities.

So I sincerely hope that leaders in OKC can tell which way the wind is blowing when it comes to streets, walkability, and even public transit. (Check out Jeff Bezdek's proposal for a modern streetcar system in Oklahoma City). And judging from all the press the issue has received lately, it is clearly blowing in abundance. You could even say that the wind is sweeping down the plain. And while American cities wouldn't have to completely do away with cars like the German town of Freiburg, anyone can tell that there's a sea change happening. Our streets are for more than cars and tumbleweeds.

Peeps's First Birthday

2009-05-19T22:11:00.006-04:00

Cousin Piersson turned one a little while ago. Cinco de Mayo was the theme. There was a pinata and a chili t-shirt involved. I did a handstand then ate too many soft tacos. There were beers in metal buckets. Peter and Janice baked a cake that Emily decorated with peppers made of icing. The sky thought about raining, then thought twice and cleared up. That made everyone even happier. I heard there was an after party somewhere. Peeps got some cool stuff, including this wagon. He took a piece of cake and smashed it in his hand. He likes to hunch his shoulders and say "Hi!" to everyone he sees. My cousin Margaret visited from Brooklyn. Even though Peeps had never met her, when he saw her for the first time, he said "Hi!"

Some Developments

2009-05-19T22:00:00.004-04:00

Rapid developments in Emmett's world, and at the risk of sounding like a rabid cheerleading parent who celebrates every first step as if his child were the first child to take a first step, I will hereby celebrate a few first steps. All in the same week Emmett rolled over onto his stomach by himself, put his toes in his mouth, started to eat solid food on a regular basis. He loves pureed parsnips. That's my boy. He also loves to grab his you-know-what during bathtime. That's my boy.

Emmett's Easter Dress

2009-04-25T08:20:00.004-04:00

What a wild time we've had lately. Easter saw Emmett dressed in a dress, an episode in honor of his great-great grandmother, Anna Marie Eichling Reynolds. You see, Anna Marie had four children in the 1910s and 1920s in Porum, Oklahoma, but only one of them, Charles Lee Jr., survived, the others dying of various (and today very curable) childhood illnesses. Her only daughter, Wanda Lee, died at the tender age of 4, and her passing left a heavy load on Anna Marie's heart--so heavy that, years later when her own grandson was about to have his first child, she insisted that the child would be a girl and that her name should be Wanda Lee. That child turned out to be me, a boy, and I happened to be named Charles Lee IV. But Anna Marie was so old, so fragile, and so insistent that my parents decided they couldn't deny her this one satisfaction...so they dressed me in pink dresses every time they went to Anna Marie's house. She died when I was six months old, but she departed this earth happy, thinking I was a baby girl named Wanda Lee. Meanwhile, I'm left with the strange knowledge that I was a part-time transvestite for the first half-year of my life. While we haven't cross-dressed Emmett before and don't intend to carry on the tradition, we thought it would be a nice tribute to Anna Marie Eichling Reynolds to put our little man in a little Easter dress. The other pictures here show that Emmett can now sit in a high chair and grasp Sophie the giraffe. Big steps! Big steps!
CORRECTION: My mother informs me that she and my father only dressed me in a pink dress once for Anna Marie's benefit. They also reminded me that there's a photograph commemorating the occasion. I'll post it as soon as I can. I'll give you a juicy detail to tide you over: Mama's (They called her Mama) glasses are on crooked.

Three Bedroom Single Family in Edmond, OK

2009-03-31T19:58:00.004-04:00

Lured by the promise of affordable real estate, the Mr. and I have been toying with the idea of a move. That's right folks - to Oklahoma. We spied this little beauty in Edmond for the low, low price of $50K, complete with DIY swing. Wow. Yeah, I know, we were pretty bowled over too. Maybe the tarp is even included! Whaddya think?

Peek-A-Boo!

2009-03-29T08:20:00.005-04:00

Some Definitions

2009-03-08T19:28:00.006-04:00

Oklachusetts. Part plain, part coast. A hybrid land. Neither red nor blue. Purple. A state of suspension, inhabitants emulsified between poles. Yankee and Okie, pilgrim and pioneer forever on the frontier. This land is a theshhold, a liminal zone.

We hereby adopt Keats's term "Negative Capability," from his letter of Sunday, December 21, 1817, as our state motto: "Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

To be in Oklachusetts is to be in uncertainty, mystery, or doubt. This is a positive condition.

When we negate, we shun ideology and ideologues. Our only ideology is non-ideology; we do not cling to it absolutely. We float, but recognize that at any time we may sink.

Oklachusetts is a state of mind. It is fragile, and it knows no boundaries. We have many citizens, all of whom, like us, forever consider emigrating. It would be easier to live in Oklahoma or Massachusetts.

Easier, but not better.

Japolish or Polanese?

2009-03-02T11:35:00.002-05:00

Necessity is the mother of invention. Recession is the mother of necessity. This means that recession is the grandmother of invention. Dear Grandma Recession, we have a brand-new cuisine for you, and we hope you are proud of our scrappy ingenuity, our pioneering pluck: last night we dined on Japolish food. Hybridity is de rigeur in Oklachusetts--this state of suspended animation between coast and plain--and so we ate the Polanese delicacy of potato and cabbage miso soup. It was delicious. It was two tastes for the price of one (which was nothing, since we had everything we needed). It was traveling in two places simultaneously, without going anywhere. It was a reduction of globalism served in the cold dish of isolationism. It was...well, you get the point. It was mind-blowing.

Readers, do you do this, too? Do you play the game called "Let's cook whatever is in the pantry tonight"? Do you mash-up as you gourmandize? What fantastically bicameral broths have you concocted recently? Please, do share. And see if you can give a name to your culinary experiments.

Swedish Snot Sucker

2009-02-28T06:51:00.010-05:00

Emmett has had a cold the past couple of days, and it's brought out the worst in us. Whoever invented the bulb aspirator clearly never had children. You know, this infernal thing:

Imagine two rookie parents trying to subdue a child prone to spasmosis long enough to insert a rubber tip into his nose just far enough to get suction but not too far to do any damage. He howls, we howl, the snot remains lodged in his schnoz. The first thing I'm going to teach Emmett to do--before I teach him to pee in the backyard or rap the lyrics to Bone Thugs-n-Harmony--is blow his nose. We're going to turn it into a sacred ritual. The kleenex box will become the pathway to his liberation, an emblem of free and clear passages.

To breathe easy is the American dream. The Puritans left England because they were congested in the old world by all those immoral plays and lax religious laws; Lewis and Clark bored into the hinterland of the new world like a blast of saline because the bustling life along the frontier had gotten too blocked and stuffy. Imagine the burst of clarity their first unencumbered inhalation of Oregon's salty coastal air must have delivered! Almost enough to ignore the burgeoning awareness that later explorers would decimate and dislodge native people, like Sacagawea, who helped them on their way! If nose-clearing is our American baby's birthright, it is a dubious one, fraught with violence and disaster, and the use of the bulb aspirator represents this checkered heritage. Why must we always drill our way to relief? Drill here! Drill now!

We've heard about the ancient practice of sucking the snot out of a baby's nose (I am sure Sacagawea herself engaged in this practice). When searching for some snot-sucking tips, we came across this magical device:

It is the Nose Frida, made in Sweden, which allows you to suck the baby's snot without a) jamming an aspirator in his nose, Lewis-n-Clark style or b) engaging in mouth-to-nose removal of nasal cavity secretions, which to some might be considered "oogy."

Oogy be damned! If it came to it, I'd place my lips on that nose to bring some relief; but if there were a way to avoid it...well, then. The Nose Frida works something like this:

I mean, check out this kid. She loves how easy snot removal has become. Plus, she has a killer scandinavian mullet. You got to give it to the Swedes. If only they had colonized America! Instead of "Manifest Destiny" (look where that's gotten us), we might have had "Manifest Design": instead of a nation of Wal-Marts, we'd be a nation of Ikeas. Instead of silly, frumpy, dowdy, ornamental, or ostentatious, we could have been modest, well-proportioned, in tune with nature, pragmatic.

My point is this: you can tell a lot about a nation by the way its citizens remove their children's snot. Runny noses are inevitable, transnational, global, universal; responses to them vary. If I'm right about this, then what can we learn about the Hungarians from their Baby-Vac? What does it mean when you suck snot with a vacuum cleaner?

Emmett Speaks!

2009-02-21T10:35:00.001-05:00

Fun Times in Oklachusetts

2009-02-21T10:27:00.003-05:00

Twilights

2009-02-08T09:11:00.003-05:00

Emily has been "bitten" by Stephenie Meyer's novels. Here's my take:

***

The drawer was dusty and cold, and Vincent couldn't wait to leave it. He wanted to see again another glimpse of Beatrice, whose smooth, translucent skin normally would have been such a temptation for Vincent's kind. But Beatrice's was not. He knew he could never treat her like he was supposed to: he could never bind her to other papers, like his family insisted he should. He was a paper clip and she a piece of paper, and their union, if it happened at all, was to be violent and swift. This was the script destiny had written for them. But Vincent knew he could revise the script! (He was a close observer of the man's whose drawer he inhabited--the man who made marks on papers, crossed out some, made more marks). Yes, he would revise the script of his destiny: he would never clip and bind Beatrice against her will. He would try to make her fall in love with him, but it would be her choice. If she attached herself to him, it would be Beatrice who chose this fate. The air in the drawer was stale. Vincent was growing restless.

***

Mordecai lurked near the base of the lamp, the springs in his jaw poised to snap shut at the slightest agitation. He had been on edge lately. It had been a while since the man had used him--been a while since he'd seen the man at all--and Mordecai felt worthless, old, forgotten. He remembered the days of productivity, when the two had been a team: the man feeding Mordecai papers, and Mordecai biting into them to join them with his sharp metallic teeth. To bite into the man's papers was an act of love, of sacrifice, for it meant losing the teeth. There were replacements filed deep inside of him in a perfect row, but with each bite it was as if Mordecai had been bitten. He was both wounder and wounded. And now the man had disappeared, and with him, so had Mordecai's sense of purpose. He had begun to stare in his boredom and desperation at the printer, where he noticed a single piece of paper resting in the cradle, waiting for something to happen to it. A delicate ivory feuille he had to make his.

***

Where had he gone! The man who punched at keys to make the pretty clicking noises! Beatrice was lonely and scared. She was the youngest member of her family, but all her family members had left home long ago. They had been swept up with a whir and a whoosh into the machine and had come out with the exotic, mysterious tattoos. Beatrice had watched the man gather them, one by one, into a stack or stacks: the smaller ones were joined by clips; biggers one by staples. Beatrice had waited patiently for her turn, had tried to project an image of calm and peace to her siblings. But deep inside she was tormented by haunting questions. What would her marks look like when her time came? Would she be sorted into a small or big stack? Would she be joined by a clip or a staple? This last question caused her the most agony. Which would she prefer to be joined by? One was lithe and long, elegant and gentle and graceful. She had heard him moving around in the drawer. The other was compact and quick and cold, snapping, sharp, pinching. She had observed him glinting on the desk. Both were beautiful and dangerous. Beatrice was a blank slate, a tabula rasa. She wanted to dictate the terms of her own surrender, but how could she? She was a piece of paper, and paper has no hand in its own destiny. Paper is a hopelessly passive species, drifting here and there, billowed by whatever wind or passion blows it. She would have to wait, even if she didn't want to. She didn't want to. In an act of rebellion she'd never known before, she tensed all the fibers in her being to move her corners. Slowly, slowly, her tips curled up and up and up. She would float on a current of her own making to the man's desk to choose her own fate--stapler or clip. The man would come back to find her gone. Carlisle was his name. The man could go to hell.

***

Feet and Toes

2009-01-27T06:44:00.005-05:00

Mommy and Daddy are proud because I can finally hold my head up enough to sit in this chair. I'm happy, too, but mostly because guess what I found? TOES! I found some toes! Those little things down there that wiggle! Attached to my feet! Hey! I found some feet, too! Feet, feet, feet. Feet and toes, toes and feet. Here's a poem a wrote for the occasion:

Feet and toes

toes and feet

feet feet feet

Toes and feet

feet and toes

toes toes toes

feet toes feet

toes feet toes

toes toes feet

feet toes toes

toes feet feet

a toe and foot and a couple of feet!

No to foes,

yes to teet,

Hurrah for toes and toes and feet!

A Monster in the Kitchen

2009-01-16T05:57:00.008-05:00

I think I saw a monster in the kitchen, the boy said, pulling the covers over his chin.

How can you tell? asked his father.

It was like a potato but with horrible fangs and eyes, and it was marching across the table at me.

That sounds like Herman. Or maybe Montelle.

So we do have monsters!

Oh no! Herman is a potatoad! So is Montelle. And there are others that don't have names.

What's a potatoad? We have potatoads?

Oh yes, loads of them. They live in a basket by the fridge.

But what are they? asked the son.

A hybrid species. Half potato, half toad. They live in the ground in fields near swamps or bogs.

Are they mean? Will Herman and Montelle or the rest of them hurt us?

Oh no. They're very tame. If anything, they're afraid of us.

Why?

Because we eat them.

No!

Yes, sometimes.

But why?

It's a fact of life in Oklachusetts. We harvest potatoads from their holes in the ground, and then keep them in the basket next to our fridge

until it's time to eat them.

That's not very nice. I don't want to eat a potatoad. I think they're cute, said the little boy, completely forgetting that he had ever thought them monstrous.

It's not that nice. You're correct, son. But they help us to be big and strong.

But why should they die so that we can live?

The father thought for a moment. He was fairly astounded by his son's question.

Well, son, they don't have to. But something has to. If we didn't eat the potatoads, we'd eat something else.

Like Care Bears?

Yes, like Care Bears.

Or arugula?

Or argula.

If we eat arugula and Care Bears, can we stop eating potatoads and make a warming hut for them so they won't freeze?

You bet.

And keep them as pets.

Our new pets, the potatoads!

But the other two need names!

Do you want to name them? asked the father.

Yes, said the boy. I will name them...I will name them...the boy was deep in thought...I will name them Bluebell and Pepper.

Herman, Montelle, Bluebell, and Pepper?

Yes, said the boy. Herman, Montelle, Bluebell, and Pepper who live in a warming hut in the basket next to the fridge in our kitchen. The boy felt cozy and warm inside and fell fast asleep.

Les Poissons, Les Poissons, Hee Hee Hee Haw Haw Haw

2009-01-10T09:37:00.003-05:00

A certain little boy, dressed in a certain little Gaulic outfit, has told his parents to read Mark Bittman's call for a New Year's reorg of the pantry. They did, and so have decided to venture to the market to buy some essentials. The little boy says, mais oui, bien sur! The parents say, Ooh la la. Ensemble, ils decident de manger la soupe de poisson ce soir. Fish chowder!

On the Table, On the Floor

2009-01-08T06:40:00.003-05:00

In Oklachusetts we wash our kids in the sink and dress them on the kitchen table, then let them play on the floor with a teething ring from Tiffany's. Walt Whitman said, "I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." He was speaking about Oklachusetts.

New Year's in Oklachusetts

2009-01-01T17:40:00.007-05:00

What do you do to ring in the new year? Monday's Op-Art in The Times made me wonder what we do in Oklachusetts to bring good luck. It seems like we realize that beards are rough on newborn skin, shave a moustache, brave a snow storm to go to a dim sum dinner party, show off our son in his new teddy bear snow suit, return home by 10, fall asleep by 11. On New Year's Day we eat toast with black coffee for breakfast, black-eyed pea soup with kale and ham hock for lunch, homemade carrot-applesauce for a snack, Emily's famous whole grain pancakes for dinner. Oh, and Emmett drinks a quart of breast milk. About the black-eyed peas: I start soaking them at 5:30 in the morning, use a hock that our friend Anne smoked herself, and cook the soup while wearing Emmett in a sling. We eat the dish in memory of the inimitable Betty Brown, my grandmother, who used to make something like it every New Year's Day (probably sans kale). We start a Skype account in the hope of having some conversations with some of you lovely people who also have Skype accounts (If you do, look us up). We thank our lucky stars we have each other and our health. We lounge on the couch and watch East of Eden starring James Dean. That's our New Year's tradition in Oklachusetts. I don't think it's lame at all. I think it's grand.

Les Photos Festives de la Famille Reynolds

2008-12-28T07:11:00.003-05:00

Matching Outfits

2008-12-25T10:32:00.002-05:00

Holiday Cousins

2008-12-25T10:19:00.002-05:00

Happy X-Max! From Emmett and Piersson

2008-12-25T10:07:00.003-05:00

Now on YouTube, Emmett and Friends!

2008-12-22T17:12:00.003-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sluh-N6fcjU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLM9zyFEUcw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-wTOtoMRJo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SNWleSYH2k

O Tannenbaum!

2008-12-17T06:53:00.003-05:00

Life on the Farm in Oklachusetts

2008-12-15T11:23:00.004-05:00

What a blast from the past. Our friend Ward (who's taken to calling himself "Wardo" in comments to this blog) sent these pictures along from when he and Emily worked on an organic farm together in the spring, summer, and fall of 2004. A Yankee girl driving a tractor? If that's not Oklachusetts Gothic, I don't know what is. That year we ate like peasants (by which I mean we ate like royalty), pulling fresh sugar snap peas off of the vine and eating them standing up in the fields (I visited often); tugging ripe strawberries up from the ground; eating asparagus right off the stalk. During lunch, Emily, Will, Verena, Lucas, and Ward (what a crew!), would laze around a picnic table and eat farmers' sandwiches of cheese, tomatoes, lettuce on whole wheat bread. Sometimes they let me hang around, when I wasn't working at the now defunct Someday Cafe in Davis Square. The steam and burnt grounds and disgruntled customers of a coffee shop seemed a cruel counterpoint to the sunshine and dirt and bugs on the farm. As we settle in to new routines, we hope we don't forget this ancient way of living that's too often forgotten, and we hope Emmett won't be too quick to join the hubbub. Even though that summer seems far away now, we try to retain the spirit of Lindentree Farm in our lives by believing that we are what we eat, and our son is, too (alas, too often the three of us are take-out). But Emmett, the sun and the rain and the dirt made some organic matter grow until we plucked it and ate it and slowly, slowly transformed it into you. If anybody ever asks what you are, tell them proudly you are a Brussels sprout.

MAS EMMETT MAS AMOR

2008-12-11T06:43:00.005-05:00

Static

2008-11-30T09:25:00.008-05:00

Emmett is asleep in the kitchen, drugged to slumber by radio static.

White noise is an uncanny soporific.

We've been drugged, too, but by a different kind of white noise: the clatter and clamor of so-called experts, of baby-book authors with competing politics, of chatrooms, Web sites, blogs. (Massahoma, Oklachusetts is our hallucination).

New parents crave this dope like junkies, but they could learn from their children.

There is an unwitting wisdom in Emmett's response to racket. To sleep through commotion, to find rest in unrest, stability in upheaval, stillness in motion.

All too soon our son will rejoin the chorus (he's stirring as I type, chattering like a chipmunk). What's does he need? Is he hungry? Is he uncomfortable?

To tune in to Emmett, we tune out.

Thanksgiving Turkey

2008-11-27T10:13:00.000-05:00

Exclusive! First Gallery of Emmett at Home

2008-11-19T18:07:00.004-05:00

People Magazine offered us $4 million for the rights to this spread, but we figured we'd reward the readers of Oklachusetts by giving it away for free on this blog.

Emmett Charles Reynolds

2008-11-10T17:21:00.004-05:00

Introducing Our Son...

2008-11-08T14:05:00.008-05:00

Born at 11:02 a.m. on November 7, 2008. 7 lbs 4 oz, 19 1/4 inches long. Happy and healthy. We are in awe.

Change Is On The Way

2008-11-04T06:28:00.001-05:00

Provisioning

2008-11-03T11:47:00.004-05:00

Only a handful of days to go and I suppose we're as ready as we're going to get. Now I find I am confronting the urge to put up large quantities of food to feed myself and Chad as we look forward to (doing not much other than) feeding our new little one. My good friend Anne and I recently butchered and prepared a dozen organic ducks she'd ordered (if you don't know Anne, she is a 21st-century woman who would be entirely at home in the 18th or 19th century; she makes just about everything she eats from scratch: prosciutto, bacon, cheeses, sausage, stock, applesauce and cider (varietal of course), buying raw ingredients from local farms using sustainable production methods. In short, she's pretty amazing - the knowledge and talent of an 80 year old cook packed into a 5'2'' 30-year old frame - and if the apocalypse ever comes, I'm heading straight to her basement with its 6 fridges and freezers packed to bursting with amazing food). The dozen ducks were transformed over a period of days...carcasses into stock, fat rendered and packed in pints for frying potatoes and other things, breasts brined and smoked into duck ham or cured into duck prosciutto, legs cured and poached in their fat for duck confit, some shredded into Spanish-flavored rillettes. Oh boy. I also bought two cases of heirloom apples from Anne, who had purchased 20 cases from a farmer in southern Vermont. You won't find any Macintosh or Macouns in this lot. She chose 8 varieties including Esopus Spitzenberger, Ashmeade's Colonel, Black Oxford, Cox's Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, and Belle de Boskoop. They vary widely in texture and acidity...some are really meant more for cooking than eating as is. They're beautiful. Today I think I'll make some squash and apple soup with squash from my friend Ward - a farmer at Hutchin's Farm in Concord. Yum. Gain a few more ounces while you're still all cozy in my belly, baby.

Four Days

2008-11-03T06:54:00.002-05:00

What to name the child? We wrack our brains. We debate picking something out of a hat. Is it true what they say, that "nomen est omen"?

True story: my grandmother Betty wasn't "Betty" until she chose it for herself in her fourth or fifth year. Before that, she was known simply as "Baby." One day her parents sat her down and said, "Baby, we can't call you "Baby" forever. What would you like us to call you?" Baby thought for a moment. The wind swept over the proverbial plains. "Betty," she said, and so it was. To those who knew Betty, I think you'll agree it was the perfect name for the person. To those who didn't know Betty, suffice it to say that my sister named her fearless Calico cat "Betty Brown." That Betty Brown likes to drink water from the bathroom sink tap and "accidentally" fall into someone's hot bath water. She likes to fight her older, canine sibling named Bo--and win. Now, did feline Betty come to be so ornery because of her name or does her name merely draw attention to her orneriness?

What to name our child? We've looked over the plains and felt the winds sweeping. They sweep far, wide, and fast. We listen for any names they may carry on their wings. (They do not carry any names on their wings.) I guess we'll just have to wait until the end of the week to meet this new person, sit him or her down, and say, "Baby, you have only been alive for a couple hours now. We cannot call you "Baby" forever. What do you want us to call you? This name? That name? Or this name? Oh, or that name? Or one of these other names on our list? Your choice. And, Baby, no pressure."

6 Days

2008-11-01T09:58:00.003-04:00

The Macabre Ride of Chadgar Allan Poe.

True! I am nervous--dreadfully nervous I was, and am--but why will you call me mad? Observe how calmly, how reasonably, how inutterably awesomely I utter this ditty.

I went to school yesterday on a bicycle dressed as a dead writer from the 19th century. I had shorn my barb into a fey, wee little 'stache, scraped a razor cross my cheek for the first time in years. Yes, I drew some blood. But I was undeterred. I was to teach "The Tell-Tale Heart" that day, and I would be in character. My wife, who was not uncongenial to my plans, loaned me a grey scarf whose silken lustre approached the Oriental. I secured my French cuffs with knotted links, threw on my velvet tunic, hopped on my veloped, and was off. The air was of much such an air as befits All Hallow's Eve: cold, crisp, cutting. A skein of frost began to encrust my upper lip's hirsuteness. My cheeks faded to a more than unearthly wanness. My fingerless gloves did little to keep my fingers warm. I edged to the brink of the tarn they call "Jamaica Pond" to behold, reflected on its muddy surface, a moustachioed man on a bicycle wearing a scarf. If there were any fissures in his mien, they were only barely perceptible.

One Week Left

2008-10-31T06:41:00.002-04:00

Today is Halloween. We've bought all our candy and we're all dressed up. Now we sit on the front porch and wait for the kid to arrive. We're not spooked.

14 Days

2008-10-24T06:53:00.004-04:00

Just two weeks before we depart on our big trip. If parenthood is anything like India, where we lived as newlyweds, it will rain a lot and at times it will feel like a jungle. But I suspect it will also bedazzle with its sights and smells, its sheer natural beauty, and the goodness of the people. We will never want to leave.

16 Days

2008-10-22T20:52:00.004-04:00

Just had dinner at Matt Murphy's, the best Irish pub in Brookline, with Jane and Mike, the best parents in Massahoma. Fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, shepherd's pie with lamb, beef stew, soda bread, and a slab o' butter the size of a cake of soap. We washed our mouths out thoroughly with that soap, then topped it off with some bread pudding. Our unborn child will be loving life tomorrow. And the next day. And when s/he--definitely a "he," if the Chinese Lunar calendar has anything to say about it--finally comes home to live with us, s/he will be loving life in the cradle that Jane and Mike brought over. Just look at this thing, folks. Handmade in Grandpa Pierre's garage shop by none other than Grandpa P. himself, this thing will be around until the end of time. Piersson used it, our little ________________(fill in the blank) will use it. If I were 1'8'' tall, I'd use it. Good night.

19 Days

2008-10-19T11:39:00.007-04:00

With over a fortnight to go, we've almost put the finishing touches on our apartment. I spent yesterday and today reorganizing my desk and office, and we've continued to weed out any undesirable, ill-fitting, or outdated clothing. Boomerangs, our local thrift store, must think we're independently wealthy or proudly homeless. Probably both, since we give our belongings to the folks at the back door, and then walk through the front door to buy more stuff. But, honestly, who could refuse a pair of never-been-worn Brooks Brothers leather wing-tips (see the shoes I wore in the L'Espalier post) for $20? That's unheard of. They cost over $500 new. In other news, we've put a new felt pad under our living room rug and organized the tools in the closet. This afternoon we're taking the coffee table to our Canton workshop to stain it black to bring it in line with our theme of "classy." We're also picking up a slipcover we had made for our couch. And there's a Home Depot stop in the works: hooks, latches, and various other gimcracks will help us keep extraneous shit a) off the floor, b) closed tight, and c) out of our business! We're pumped. We're feeling it. Ain't no inanimate object gonna interfere with our soon-to-be animate object.

24 Days

2008-10-14T21:21:00.002-04:00

A gallery of oldies but goodies:

25 Days

2008-10-13T22:04:00.005-04:00

We don't have a "theme" for our "nursery." But we do have a thesis that a "nursery" doesn't need a theme and a child doesn't need a "nursery." We hope we're right, because our child is getting one corner of our bedroom.

26 Days

2008-10-12T11:35:00.004-04:00

Michael and the gang threw a party last night for their friend Jason, the world traveling motorcycle salesman, who is departing for points beyond, probably Columbia. I thought this was an appropriate choice, so close to Columbus Day. We arrived at 10:30 p.m., after a James Tate poetry reading at the final So and So Series (adieu, adieu). Somebody said, look! it's Emily and Chad impersonators! I thought this was an appropriate comment, coming as it did so close to Halloween. There was Amber with her six-month-old daughter. Uncle Mike washed out a beer bottle twice and let Fiona play with it on the floor. The child had a mohawk and people got a kick out of this. I thought this was appropriate, seeing how children often have the kind of cool, unkempt hair that adults are wont to covet. Emily said it was her last hoorah, which I thought was appropriate, given we have 26 days left before our child is born. On the ride home, I thought of the Ween song, "Your Party." I thought this was a very appropriate song to think of, since after all we had just been to a party.

28 Days

2008-10-10T07:12:00.004-04:00

Four weeks to go. The countdown begins. Today I'm riding my bicycle to work. We are having pasta for dinner. I have grown a beard. Emily feels the child kicking on her innards. We have some things still to do: finish the office; hang our artwork; install a light above the crib; put a slipcover on our couch; install shelves near the changing table. It is 58 degrees in Boston and may rise as high as 72. A perfect day for riding a bike to work. You can see a picture of the bike I ride to work in the post about our trip to that fancy restaurant. Tonight we are eating pasta. 28 days left.

Shower: The Sequel

2008-10-08T20:14:00.006-04:00

Apple Picking! Fruit! Fertility! Tumescence!

2008-09-27T13:49:00.006-04:00

It's a Boy!

2008-09-27T13:21:00.004-04:00

Well, not ours--we still don't know the gender of our bubba dean. But my sister Lizzie and her husband Josiah--possibly the two coolest people we know--just learned that they're having a boy!

Here's how they found out. L and J asked their ultrasound technician to write down the baby's sex on a slip of paper and seal it in an envelope.

After the appointment, Lizzie drove to her favorite bakery (yes, she has a favorite bakery! Brown's Bakery in Oklachusetts City!), handed the baker the envelope, and asked him to make a cake dyed to match the baby's gender--blue for a boy, pink for a girl--and then frost over it to make it a surprise.

She picked up the cake on a Friday afternoon and then threw a dinner party for our parents and her in-laws. The plan was to cut the cake after dinner, but they couldn't wait. They decided to cut the cake and then eat dinner. It's a boy!

Bo's eyes reflect the evening's excitement. Blue! Arf! Blue!

Big Night Out at L'Espalier

2008-09-17T19:47:00.004-04:00

We decided a couple weeks ago to live it up while we still could. So we donned our best duds, had our neighbor Julian snap these pics, hopped on the train, and headed for the fanciest restaurant in town. Three hours later we stumbled outside, too full to walk back to the train. We hailed a cab and marveled at what we'd just accomplished. The meal: hors d'oeuvres of smoked salmon napolean in a buckwheat crepe with chervil; amuse bouche of poached sea bass cheek, heirloom tomato, and truffle; warm salad of haricots verts with frizzled prosciutto, croutons, and a coddled egg; almond-dusted sauteed sweetbreads on an open-faced "grilled cheese"; mint and cucumber soup with creme fraiche and grilled shrimp; foie gras with roasted nectarine glaze, pickled shallots, and toasted brioche points; Muscovy duck breast over scallion johnnycake with blackeyed peas and fresh watermelon; roasted saddle of Vermont rabbit with herbed gnocchi, wild mushrooms, and rabbit kidney and liver; cheese plate consisting of seven artisanal cheeses with plum puree, apricot puree, and honey with toasted pine nuts; wild berry souffle with dark chocolate sauce and fresh mint ice cream; sweet corn meringue with shortbread and balsamic reduction; an assortment of petits fours. Dear god. This was the most decadent meal ever. Thank goodness for our gift certificate and my old friends at L'Espalier who took great care of us.

Here she is folks...

2008-09-09T09:05:00.004-04:00

After many trials and tribulations, the old Craigslist-dresser-cum-changing-table is finished. We had to relent and allow Peter to sand it down and then spray on two coats of black, satin-finish oil paint...not the toxin-free endeavor I'd originally envisioned, but alas, my milk paint experiment was ill-fated. Still, looks pretty dang good (especially for $50 and a few cans of paint). It's now filled with onesies and diapers and tiny socks, and we're in the process of staining Ikea's Sniglar beech crib black to match. Will post pics of the entire nursery ensemble when that's done...

Baby at 28 Weeks!

2008-08-28T14:06:00.003-04:00

A Poem for Piersson

2008-08-26T10:59:00.006-04:00

I wrote this poem in May while in the waiting room at Newton Wellesley hospital. Emily was in the birthing room with her sisters and mother. She came out to say Jane's child would be born any minute. Suddenly everything seemed supercharged with meaning. So I wrote a poem for my first nephew--who is now my first godson! Piersson, consider this my initial offering to your spiritual welfare. And as far as all that "renunciation of temptation" stuff goes, well, I consider it my solemn duty to encourage you, at an appropriate time later in your life, to conduct your own research so you can make an informed decision about what to renounce and what to celebrate.

IN THE MATERNITY WARD WAITING ROOM

For Piersson Michael Purnell

The Celtics are crushing the Hawks
as some kids bobble a latex glove
they’ve blown into a balloon.

Emily rushes in to say your mother’s
been pushing for an hour and that soon
you’ll be here. She hurries away.

A toilet flushes. A commercial hints
at what happens in the next episode of Lost.
The elevator dings and a group

of pregnant women on tour walk past.
The kids who’ve popped the balloon
and now color in coloring books learn

from their exhausted father that it’s time
to go—a minor protest, then they’re gone.
The registrar asks if everyone

but the television has deserted me.
Empty for a moment, this room
seems more a corridor than a room,

a brief passage between sets
of backlit double doors. Nephew,
who are you? Who will you be?

On ABC the Big Three are sitting
on the bench with towels on their heads,
giving each other high fives, waiting,

resting for what the commentators
and every spectator agree

are the more difficult games ahead.

Oklachusetts Gothic

2008-08-24T19:02:00.002-04:00

Thank You, Peter and Janice! We're Floored!

2008-08-24T09:41:00.007-04:00

Hick-up

2008-08-21T10:54:00.002-04:00

Apparently this is standard late-pregnancy fare, but last night I felt the baby hiccupping for the first time! Wild! I was wondering why s/he was kicking so rhythmically in one spot: dancing? inherited its dad's drumming talent? Then I realized what was happening. Way cool.

Em at 28 Weeks

2008-08-20T09:29:00.002-04:00

Bureau d'Echange, cont.

2008-08-18T21:43:00.007-04:00

So, much to my consternation, the refinishing of the antique dresser with old-school, non-toxic products rather than the standard ones labeled "Contains substances known in the state of California to cause birth defects and other reproductive harm" has presented some problems.

The original plan: strip it down to bare wood, paint with black milk paint (a centuries old mixture of lime, milk protein, and pigments), finish with tung oil (from a Chinese tree's nut) and carnauba wax. I mean, people eat milk and nuts, right? You can't get much more benevolent. We'd stripped the piece, patched some chips in the drawer front veneer, and put on two coats of the milk paint, rubbing it down with 0000 steel wool after each to burnish the surface. Looked fabulous. But milk paint is very porous...it absorbs oils from your skin, etc., if you don't seal it with something. We tried three hardware stores in our search for pure tung oil; not even the Depot had it. Finally ended up at Rockler Woodworking in Cambridge (very well-regarded by those into all things wood), where they carried everything we needed. Giles, a knowledgeable and friendly fellow who works at Rockler, must have spent 30 minutes discussing our options with us. He recommended a water-based polyacrylic for durability - said people used it over milk paint all the time. We bought both that and the tung, to keep our options open.

Next time we made it down to the Ladow garage to apply our finish, we took the easy way out and didn't test the two products on a sample piece of wood. BIG mistake. Chad and my mom agreed I was being too anal in my insistence to test them out...that we'd never finish the damn thing, and that we should just go with the polyacrylic. I acquiesced. Well, the polyacrylic wasn't leveling at all as Chad applied it...every brush stroke was preserved on the surface of the dresser. Totally unacceptable. I told Chad to try sanding it after it had dried with silicon carbide paper...used in automotive jobs. He tried it both dry and wet (the super-fine grit and water create a slurry that's almost like pumice and supposedly can help you get a glass-smooth surface). Instead, sanding brought out these little white flecks in the milk paint, or took it off entirely if the area was raised at all, and didn't seem to erase the brush marks. WTF?

Now we're at a point where Peter (our expert woodworking resource) thinks we should just sand everything down a bit and slap on some good ol' high-VOC black oil paint, which will level beautifully and withstand all sorts of abuse. My attempts to create something beautiful AND non-toxic have been foiled. Will all those nasty chemicals volatilize before we bring it home to our bedroom?

More later...

Outsider Art at The Reynolds Gallery

2008-08-16T13:57:00.005-04:00

Fathers and Poems

2008-08-11T22:56:00.006-04:00

Impending fatherhood has got me thinking about poems about fathers or by fathers. Here are some I like. This list is by no means exhaustive.

One of my all-time favorites, "Those Winter Sundays," by Robert Hayden.

Another beauty, "My Papa's Waltz," by Theodore Roethke.

Philip Larkin's classic "This Be The Verse."

There's Ariel's song from Shakespeare's The Tempest.

An elegiac Li-Young Lee in "Eating Together."

Ezra Pound on cultural paternity in "A Pact."

There are many other poems I could link to. Instead, I'll paste a poem I wrote a number of years ago, before our little unborn baby was even a gleam in my eye. I suppose you could call it an homage to my own father (whose name sadly isn't "Cecil").

THE LATER CECILS

In the Seventies the Later Cecils
slammed Pabst Blue Ribbons, got stoned on Sticky
Fingers, while the Middle Cecils stammered
about mid-Century modern design,
smoked Gauloises cigarettes, and drank Vermouth.
The Early Cecils in their advanced years
sentimentalized the heroic feats
of the Ancient Cecils, the all-time
best generation of Cecil, hands down.

In the Eighties the Later Cecils tied
their knots, switched to Scotch whiskey, and suffered
the vicissitudes of volatile stocks.
They sired the rambunctious Latest
Cecils, as the surly Middle Cecils
waxed nostalgic for the Early Cecils
and the Ancient Cecils—all things Cecil.

In the Nineties the Later Cecils had
midlife crises, purchased Porsches, divorced
the Mrs. Later Cecils, quit drinking
long enough to chaperone the teenage
Latest Cecils to the Stones reunion
tour in Madison Square Garden. Stating
that the Middle Cecils’ taste in music
put the fritz on such father-son bonding,
the Later Cecils screamed, “I can’t get no
satisfaction!” to their sons’ great dismay.

In the early Twenty-First Century
the Later Cecils, now silver Cecils,
putter about the house in house slippers,
sipping soda water with twists of lime.
They insist to the Latest Cecils, who
visit most Sundays with their girlfriends
the soon-to-be Mrs. Latest Cecils,
that posterity will one day agree
the Later Cecils were the greatest Cecils.

Oklachusetts City in the News!

2008-08-08T21:38:00.002-04:00

Holy Smokes! In the "Escapes" section of today's New York Times, there's a lengthy article about OKC, my fair and sprawling hometown. The author, one Mr. Finn-Olaf Jones, had the good sense to interview my cousin's girlfriend and to point shoppers to Mockingbird Manor, owned by another cousin's wife. Well done, Mr. Jones!

Trip to Oklachusetts City, Part Two

2008-08-06T10:59:00.005-04:00

The brother-in-law, a pool, me.

The wife (the child), a scallop shell, some ducks.

The spread, a fawn, some emperors.

The wife (the child), a dog, me.

The mother, me, a present, the wife (the child).

The father, some horns.

Trip to Oklachusetts City, Part One

2008-08-06T10:45:00.007-04:00

The sister.

The grandfather.

The grandfather, a reflection, a bench, me.

The okra frying in a pan, the Wesson, a kettle.

The wife (the child), the uncle, the father.

Grown-ups, Not Grown-Downs

2008-07-31T11:00:00.024-04:00

Emily and I flew to the western part of the state for a baby shower in Oklachusetts City (see photographs in "Trip to Oklachusetts City," pts. 1 and 2). Despite the triple-digit heat, despite the donuts, despite the adamantine cast iron of claw-foot bathtubs, a lovely time was had by all. Thank you to the nine (yes, 9!) hostesses of our lovely fete. We look forward to entering a grateful, gushing note about the occasion in the baby book we received on Saturday.

Until then, a few observations about baby product names.

As Emily and I "feather" our "nest," we've been amused and disturbed by the phenomenon whereby companies give their baby products ridiculous, silly, cutesy-pie names. Parents need certain items to raise a kid: bibs, diapers, bottles, cribs, small clothes, pacifiers, etc. It's also nice to have a horseshoe-shaped pillow in which an infant can nestle. But why name this pillow Boppy? Why call anything Boppy, Bumbo, Schoon, Boon, Robeez, Snappi, or Snoodle? Don't such names force parents to regress into a kind of adult babyhood? Walk into a store like Magic Beans in Coolidge Corner and listen to the sound of grown-ups turning into grown-downs.

There seems to be an unwritten rule that all new products for infants must have infantile names. On one hand, branding products with playful, memorable names is a smart marketing strategy that sells units by creating a buzz. Who wouldn't want to buy three packs of Snappis with such a snappy name?! On the other hand, it is a cynical move that subtly reinforces several dangerous, spurious notions: that childhood is all fun and games, all the time; that children are the new "hip" accessories; that children must be pampered; that parents must have the latest brand-name product to be effective parents.

Just give a kid a stick and some dirt and watch magic happen. My grandfather Paul C. likes to say that when he was a kid, he'd spend hours with a shovel constructing roads in the mud for his homemade toy cars. My father spent his formative years wondering unsupervised around the streets and fields of Waleetka, playing games like "Kick the Can." Kids were kids in those days. And adults were adults. Nowadays, it seems kids grow up faster and adults try to stay young longer. Perhaps giving baby products childish names is an act of nostalgia. Perhaps we all mourn for a cultural innocence that's forever lost.

Then again, maybe I'm the cynical one. After all, what about words like like baba, binky, woobie, and even snuggle? Consider pet names. Consider Edward Lear's nonsense verse, the macabre humor in Edward Gorey's cartoons, or Lewis Carroll. My point? Adults excel at silly talk. We love to have fun with words. I myself am fluent in gibberish. My favorite musician is Shooby Taylor.

All this has me thinking about how previous generations raised their children. It wasn't always pretty. Puritans viewed childhood as a vice, a crime against humanity. They dressed their little ones like adults, expected them to grow up quickly, punished them for childish behavior. Children in the early days of the Industrial Revolution earned their keep in factories or begged on the streets. In Renaissance Europe and early America, the apprenticeship system took children as young as seven out of their homes and into the hands of a master who worked their fingers to the bone in exchange for a vocational training. It wasn't until the Victorian era in England that parents, fueled by Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, began to see childhood as a special time in a young person's life and the child as a special, privileged class of human being. In a way, the Victorians invented childhood.

I don't know if anyone has ever written a history of baby products and baby product names, but for a fascinating account of the causes and consequences of the cultural shift in attitudes toward children, check out Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood by Stephen Mintz or The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman.

An Excerpt from The Traveler's Guide to Oklachusetts

2008-07-29T10:47:00.011-04:00

Oklachusetts is an old state, one of the first in the Union. Colonists from the Old World settled the eastern half early in the 17th century, establishing industries along the rivers and coast in hopes of forging a better life. But it wasn't until the late 19th century that inhabitants, spurred by overpopulation and an insatiable thirst for natural resources, finally crossed the imposing Ouchishire Mountain range that forms the state's central spine. These pioneers discovered a rugged beauty that defied their powers of description.

One notable exception is The Diary of C.A. (Charles Astor) Lazdowskos, recently discovered wrapped in cheesecloth in a basement in New Lawton. A riveting if somewhat untempered account of the hardships and wonders of settling the western half of Oklachusetts, Lazdowskos's Diary became an instant bestseller upon its publication in 2002. In one particularly poignant passage dated April 28, 1889, Lazdowskos describes how Oklachusetts's two halves

seem determined to outduel one another for the claim of Most Sublime....Looking out over this foreign tall grass waving to and fro under the wind's relentless charge, yea, waving even to the very horizon, the smell of fresh grass baking golden in the sun and the stalks' ceaseless sussurations, one cannot help but recollect the mighty ocean stretching to infinity away from Boskogee harbor, the majesty of salty air, the insistent lurch of the tide, the overwhelming sense of something larger than you, of being alive, of being small and happy in the midst of grandeur. Coming down the western slope of the Ouchishires, confronting the endlessness of these wild plains opening up before us, we tired pilgrims feel as ones returning from a long vacation--ancient, timeless, wiser. We are happy to be Oklachusans: east or west, our world is possibility.

Coincidently, that last line has sent literary scholars scurrying to the stacks in a frenzy of bookish glee. As it turns out, Lazdowskos had departed for the west from Amherst, home to our state's finest poet, Emily Dickinson, who once wrote, "I dwell in Possibility-- / A fairer House than Prose." A guest log from the Hoffman Hotel located three doors down from Dickinson's family residence confirms Lazdowskos had spent some months there in 1884, just a year before Dickinson's death and five years before Lazdowskos would lead the westward charge. Since Dickinson only published a handful of poems in her lifetime, and the one in question wouldn't see the light of day until her Collected appeared in 1893, it's safe to say that Lazdowskos and Dickinson were, however briefly, intimates. No visit to Oklachusetts is considered complete without a stay in the quaint frontier town Lazdowskos himself founded and where he spent the rest of his days: Possibility, population 457.

Bureau d'echange

2008-07-26T20:10:00.007-04:00

More griping on the state of the baby furniture market in this country: The quality is terrible! Everything looks the damn same! And they charge an arm and a leg for their mass-produced crap. It's all made of particle board bound with formaldehyde-laden glue, and covered with either an espresso or antique white cheesy finish that ends up chipping off several months in. Our solution: Craigslist. My favorite website ever, and the source of most of our past and current furniture, Craigslist has again proven a treasure trove of inexpensive, high quality older furniture. We bought this old walnut dresser from a woman one town over for $50. It had been obscured by several coats of old paint...so Chad has been working diligently down at the Ladow garage with stripper and his putty knife. Take a look at the gorgeous shape of this thing. It's the perfect height for a changing table, plus has ample storage for all manner of baby gear in the huge drawers. We plan on finishing it with old-fashioned flat black milk paint. Add changing pad and we're ready to go! More later as we work toward completion...

Onesies In Oklachusetts

2008-07-26T12:53:00.004-04:00

Contrary to myth, children native to Oklachusetts spend only a portion of their days in the buff. In the capital city Massahoma, in vacation resorts like Cape Ketchum, in towns like Tulcester or Boskogee--young Oklachusans mostly wear getups like this one here. Yeehaw!

Fathers and Blackberries

2008-07-23T12:03:00.006-04:00

Much has been written about the Crackberriness of the Blackberry hand-held device: how it only gives the semblance of freedom and flexibility, but in reality acts as a kind of "leash" to keep people tethered to their jobs at all hours of the day. It's not just the Blackberry that's to blame, though: all these devices distract us from the here and now with their promises of "connection."

I've noticed a bitter paradox here. In connecting to someone someplace else via these PDAs (an acronym for that hideous phrase, Personal Digital Assistant), people tend to disconnect from whoever they are with and wherever they actually are. The same is true with iPods and their ilk. How many times a day have I seen someone blabbing loudly away on his phone without an ounce of regard for the people around him? How many times do you see someone, headphones in ears and head bobbing to music only he can hear, crossing the street without looking both ways...without looking any way but straight ahead? This kind of behavior used to be the exclusive purview of teenagers, but sadly it is spreading.

The most depressing instance of this phenomenon is the father who prefers sending emails on his handheld device to interacting with his attention-starved children. I've seen it twice now in two days, in two different coffee shops. Yesterday, for example, a family clearly visiting Boston sat at the table next to me. They had Tourists written all over them--maps, guides, Boston paraphernalia, cheap souvenirs. The mother drank her latte in quiet, concentrated sips, staring at the passersby on Newbury Street with an attention that seemed pointed, forced, and deliberate. Her husband sat nearby, pushing a beautiful toddler back and forth in a stroller. The child was clapping his hands, singing, talking about a bird, making goofy faces, but what did the father do? Check and send emails. Oh, every once in a while he uttered a "Yes?" or a "Really?" or an "Un-huh" without even looking up. But the poor kid eventually stopped his performance to stare forlornly at the ground. The father never noticed because he never made eye contact with anything but the screen of his PDA.

Do you remember when PDA stood for "Public Display of Affection"?

I hereby declare only to engage in old-fashioned forms of PDA with my child. You know, hugging and oohing and ahhing and speaking. If you ever catch me using any new-fangled PDA and ignoring the kid, I give you permission to snatch it from my hands and throw it into a pond. Remind me of this blog post and say "for shame."

Having said all that, it's fully acceptable for an adult to read a book or newspaper in front of a child. I know this may be logically inconsistent, but so be it. Call me biased. I'll read aloud.

What's in a Name?

2008-07-22T15:05:00.006-04:00

"A rose by any other name is just as sweet," Shakespeare had his Juliet say. But did Shakespeare know that in the 1900s "William" was the second most popular name for boys in the U.S., the eighth most popular in 2007? Did he know that there were over 240 "Juliet"s per million babies in the U.S. in 2007 and that it was the 516th most popular name? When she asked, "Wherefore art thou Romeo?", what Juliet meant to say was, "Why did your parents give you such a dumb name? Didn't they know that in America in 2007 it would be the 505th most popular? Why couldn't you have been called "Jacob," the most popular American name in 2007?" Poor Juliet: it seems "Rose" itself used to be in vogue in this country, reaching its apogee in the 1910s, when it was the 16th most popular; by last year it had dropped all the way to 351. Turns out that "Rose" by another name would in fact have been sweeter.

Where's am I getting this information? Check out the NameVoyager, up on Laura Wattenberg's new blog to promote her book, The Baby Name Wizard. Be ready to give an hour of your time seeing how popular or unique all your friends' names are.

As for my names, check this out: in the 1880s, "Charles" was the fifth most popular for boys; last year it was the 62nd. Ouch. And "Chad"? Not a single boy (or at least a statistically insignificant number of boys) was christened "Chad" in the U.S. between the 1880s and the 1930s. "Chad" reached its peak in the 1970s at number 30, then plummeted to 433 by 2007. I have a suspicion that the 2000 election had something to do with that. Who wants to name their child after something that dimples, tears, hangs, gets pregnant, AND gives Bush the White House? I bet there weren't too many ancient Greeks naming their daughters "Helen" after the Trojan War.

What about "Emily"? The name's always been around, but for the past five years, it's been number one for girls in America. My parents wanted to call me "Emily" if I had been a girl. But they thought it might be kinda creepy to name their kid after their beloved dog. They like to say their second choice was "Betsy Ross Reynolds," since my due date was the Fourth of July.

I'm going to hope they're just pulling my leg on that one.

Then again, if our child arrives a week early on Halloween, we'll name her "Pumpkin" or "Candy" if she's a girl and "Dracula" or "Ichabod" if he's a boy.

Italo Calvino in Utero

2008-07-16T12:09:00.004-04:00

On Saturday night, after eating at the wonderful Myers and Chang for my 32nd birthday, Em and I were strolling around the South End when we bumped into my friend Marco and his wife Rachel. I had met them late last year when I was serving at L'Espalier, and after talking about Chantenay carrot puree or Skip's Island Creek Oysters or whatever it was they ordered, we struck up a conversation about art and literature. When I learned Marco is Italian, I confessed that one of my favorite books is Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees, of which he highly approved. About a month later, a fellow server said that someone had dropped off a present for me at the host's stand. It was Calvino's The Non-Existent Knight and The Cloven Discount, and it was a gift from Marco and Rachel.

I sent them a thank you note but hadn't seen them again until Saturday night. I told Marco how much I had enjoyed The Non-Existent Knight and that I had moved on to a collection of Calvino's short stories called Cosmicomics. He informed me that school kids in Italy read and love these tales, despite the fact that Ph.D candidates spend years poring over them when writing their dissertations and despite the fact that they feature non-human (but very human-like) creatures all living on a single point before the Big Bang or smushed together on a nebula or orbiting the universe at light speed or back in the good ol' days when the moon was so close you could row a boat out to sea and climb up a ladder and onto it. Despite these things, Calvino's prose is clear, precise, and compelling, and at their core, his stories are just fables--and what child doesn't love a good fable!

When we returned home that night, I began to read one of these stories--"A Sign In Space"--out loud with my head resting lightly on Em's belly when--knock, knock--the baby started moving, kicking, somersaulting! The baby seemed to enjoy being read to! So I read another story the next night, part of another one the next, which I then finished last night. Each time, we could feel the baby moving as I read, though it's fair to say that we are the ones who are truly moved.