Ewte Talk

Lately there has been myriad evidence of what a good man I married, despite my cursing him privately to myself not too long ago. I am shamed, for Sunday it became clarified to the point of champagne, and I believe this calls for a toast, that yes, indeed, my mate is out there everyday, not only at bat for himself in the diamond of life, but as well his beloved wife, as he thoughtfully steps to the plate each time with full intent to blast one to the outer-spheres of hope, of happiness, of three-wish lottery winners.

Sunday I turned forty-one years old. After breakfast, because my husband Bill couldn’t stand it any longer, though perhaps because my five-year old was stretched to his secret-keeping limit (”Mom, do not go in the garage, but you will really like your big surprise that we got for you,”) I watched as my two boys dragged a wrapped box into the kitchen.

“Now what could this be?” I asked. I really had no idea. The boys, in their most authentic state, were arguing over which side of the box I should rip the paper from first: the side Max drew a birthday greeting in Sharpie pen, or the side Quinn drew his greeting in Sharpie pen. Luckily the wrapping culminated at the top and I attacked like a fast-motion cartoon, dust-paper-limbs flying. I took no prisoners.

And then. There it was. My perky new robot.

It lay innocently enough, a round uncharged machine in its box. It’s appearance was in the realm of the Cartoon: simplistic. The intent of its product design team was obvious: my new baby was easy to use. And when I turned it on, why, just watching it bump into walls and furniture legs, so perfectly circular and darling, wasn’t he friendly! (Notice the change to gender at this point. It happens with robots.)

Now, what exactly does this robot do, you are wondering? Pardon me for not mentioning. It cleans my floors so I don’t have to! Is this one of those pieces of revolutionary thinking actually R&D funded/prototyped/patented/sold/produced/marketed/bought by my husband and brought home to me, in the flesh?! Oh yeah.

But we might want to backtrack here for a brief history on the conjugal discussion that had taken place in our house over the purchase of the vacuum robot.

It began some time ago when Husband Bill had heard of this particular invention and presented the idea to Wife Stephanie repeatedly over a period of time to the Wife’s repeated inability to see much merit in its acquisition. “I can do it myself,” she would say. Unfortunately, he would always forget that she had said this by the time he asked her again, until the day she answered, “It doesn’t appear the value function out weighs the cost function of the transaction.” This time he heard. (Except you know how the story ends, so you know he really didn’t.) But at least the questioning stopped for a long while.

The thing about Wife Stephanie is that she is a very frugal woman, especially in the realm of spending for hired help, especially since she used to be that hired help herself when she was in high school and college. And she figures if she’s a SAHM then why not do-it-herself? The money she saves on hired help can always be put away in the kids’ college fund, pay down debt, or used the next time DSW Shoe Warehouse sends her a coupon in the mail that doesn’t quite cover the cost of the pair of shoes that she needs. BUT, as Husband Bill was coming to realize more and more, the cleaning of their house, with two young and active boys constantly making their presence known, was becoming an ever-increasing burden for his not-so-young (but still presentable) Wife. For starters, in order to simply hoover-up a usual day’s worth of abuse from the family, his Dearheart would have to hook up the enormous vacuum he’d rigged for the house. It was never pretty.

On an especially urgent day of sanitizing the household, Husband Bill would return home from a hard day’s work at the office to find his wife walking the halls of their home with no apparent recognition of the time of day or whether there was dinner in the oven, whether they owned children or even, if it was Wednesday, whether his journal Science arrived in the mail and where, pray tell, might it have been stashed. On days like those the family knew its job was to survive. For a time, miracles were granted.

But Husband Bill isn’t long on miracles and knows luck is what you make of it, so the day was fast approaching for a trip to Home Depot and the ritual of the passing of the credit card. The Good Spouse knew that what he was doing was the right thing to do, despite all protestations to the contrary. He was out to Save The Family. There’s nothing nobler.

And, so, as I sat on the floor the first morning of my second forty years, my grandparent’s Depression-Era thrift coursing through my veins at the sight the price sticker my sweet husband forgot to take off the robot box, I began to ask questions of Bill. Does this thing actually work? What can it do? And, if you knew my husband, you’d know that he proceeded to answer in the most fantastic detail you’d ever want to (not) hear. If that little robot was capable of feeling, he’d have blushed with the knowledge that he was in our house to stay. A home to clean of his very own at long last.
So now, days later, after Mr. Robot has cleaned for a spell, I believe I’ve permanently jumped ship. It feels very luxurious to reliquish control over my environment, albeit the floor scraps, albeit to a machine that takes all night to slurp them up. So what if the cats are freaked beyond imagination, I can now focus on the finer things of life.

Like cleaning the pee from around the toilets.

Thanks, Bill, Darling, I can see your good sense in this wonderful thoughtful gift to me. I know it was truly meant for me, because you know it will lighten my load, and not in the slightest because you think it will be way way cool to have a bona fide robot in our possession.

My five year old son Max loves cats, adores them, is passionate, crazy for them, to the point of annoyance to his older seven year old brother, Quinn.

“Meow,” Max said to Quinn the other day, licking his paw demurely.

At that moment, in Max’s mind, I’m sure he was feeling nicely feline, but the bonus that this could possibly provoke something was not lost on him. “Max, can’t you ever be anything but a cat?” Quinn demanded, perturbed.

“Meow.”
“Max!“

There was a brief moment then between them I remember, Quinn’s head down, fiddling and folding his origami creation intently while, of course, Max just waited. Max will wait until the cows come home, and the goats and the sheep, and the chickens if you put them out to pasture, if it all meant one blessed, lovely nod from You-Know-Who.

“Max,” Quinn finally asked in a tone of great thoughtfulness, of really wanting to know, “Now, Max. Here’s a question. What do you love more? And you have to tell the truth,” he said, looking up, fixing his view squarely on his brother, narrowing his eyes so to penetrate his intent into, well, brick.

“I will,” my good-natured, youngest son agreed. Max was projecting firm promise in his voice, throwing out: You Can Trust Me to the world (to his brother.) Of course you can trust him. He’s pure candor. He’s five years old for god’s sake.
“What do you love more?” Quinn asked him, “Cats,” to which Max mewed slightly for effect, “or a virus?!”

(A virus? I was washing dishes and burst out laughing.)

“Well Quinn, of course you know I will say a cat.”
“Yeah. I know,” the elder said in a tone of sudden clemency, “You love cats more than anything.”
“I know.”
“And a virus,” Quinn said, emphasizing the word because he knew of its great importance, “is microscopic. It’s even smaller than a amoeba.”
“And, Quinn, it’s smaller than infinity because everything’s smaller than infinity.”
“I know that Max.”

My Dear Quinn, how on earth did you trick us and fall into your seventh year quietly, like a snow we didn’t know was coming but in the morning, whoops, there it was: there you are. Around fifty pounds. Holy heck. Fifty pounds??!! As your younger brother Max would say, “Are you just joking me?” Wasn’t it last month you were five pounds and five ounces, all told? You were so teeny, the Doc almost didn’t let you go home with me, but you were a good baby and we were good parents at the time, back in the day, and agreed to feed you on a strict schedule from the breast, which you slept through mostly, but we got through it, and now, hell, you’re fifty pounds of pure quesadilla, and macaroni and cheese.  Okay. Okay. A handful of baby carrots.

You’ll never be a mom, and that’s good because you’re emotional like me, and I wouldn’t wish my emotions on anyone, but more to the point, as a woman I grew up believing that in my child’s elementary school years I would cry twice: on the first day of kindergarten and the first time the bus whisked you away into any and all frightening possibilities, however this is, at least in my experience, simply a hideous lie.

So far with you, when we do our ‘friends forever’ sign through the bus window each time, I walk away most times in tears. There are only so many of those ‘friends forever’ signals you’ll flash me before some kind soul behind you wizes up to what you are doing and enlightens you, and the rest of the bus, as to the good idea that it is: not very. That day will break my heart but will come, though luckily I have your younger brother to help me prepare, for he’s always had such a gifted intuition for knowing that a mother’s physical affection is flat-out uncalled for.

So, tears come easily from me for you. You were my first. I cry at each birthday. I cry while you sleep within view. Over the last couple years, I have now begun the College Countdown Cry. This past year watching Grandma Dorothy die, time spinning all around me at her deathbed, the knowledge of how swift even the longest human life becoming clear to me, I can sense the weight of your college text books landing at my feet as you turn older this year. It’s a coming.
When I tuck you in at night, once you are asleep, I see you for what you are really, actually. My perfect son. Not the older brother whose every move it is his greatest, sickest pleasure to inflict ever more expanding degrees of heartache and diminution upon the younger brother. While we might think we are witnessing this on a daily basis in the games that you play with Max, your physicality with him, and your choice of discourse with him, I am sure that it is nothing more than the normal bumps and bruises (and bloody noses, broken bones, one to two-day coma stints) of brotherhood.

But this is the day of your birth, I couldn’t be more proud of you. You are an intense worker, an honest person, someone with courage. You are a reasonable man, and quick and bright. I’ll tell you one thing absolutely. I know every single day, because you make it very clear, in no uncertain terms, that you love me very much. I am glad that you have this much love for me because you are also a person with the gift of love. This ability will grow and will include others someday, and one day, perhaps, a child of your own. Should that day come, my dear, you will be so lucky, and I will, too, because that is when it will begin to become clear to you how much I love you.

This photo was taken close to one year ago in Ephesus, Turkey. The sign says, “Dikkat Tehlike,” which is translated into the English below it: Attention Dangerous, or, Watch Out Max My Dear Boy, Not One More Step Back. Quinn, on the right, was in kindergarten then and learning to read. Could he have read it? I don’t think so. He certainly didn’t know the Turkish. What a difference a year makes. Now he can read so freely. Max, at the time, couldn’t read except for the names in our family: Max, Quinn, Mom, Dad, which was sight reading. Now, he too is learning to read and write.

In one year and a half: we sold most of the contents of our house in Virginia, packed up the rest and moved it to storage, painted and cleaned and prepared our house for rental, moved to Istanbul, set up life there (apartment, school, friends, language), learned the city somewhat, moved back to the States, back into our perfectly empty and newly-painted house, unpacked storage stuff, started going up to Pennsylvania to visit my dying grandmother who then died, settled into a new school, gathered up some furniture, made some new friends, and learned to read word by word.
Now, we are putting together electrical circuits because, as Quinn puts it, “Electricity is awesome!” Because of my kids I’ve even learned that there is such a thing as a Piezo transducer (pea-AY-zoh), a little thingamahjig that makes noise when electricity goes through it.

When we lived in Istanbul I walked everywhere. It’s what I loved about living in NY as well. And, when you walk a lot, you talk a lot. To yourself, of course. In Turkey, at least in the places I roamed, people had signs outside their front gates: Dikkat Kopek. Watch Out. Dog.
Meaning: Mr. Thief, my dog will rip the flesh from your deepest felonious desires if you try to hop my fence.

Turks are serious about this because robbery is big business in Istanbul these days. Dogs ate well in the area where we lived. Often I would walk along my way, chatting with myself just famously, when I’d see a watchdog sign on a beautifully tiled, gated entrance. I’d have to interrupt with my best Turkish accent: Dikkat Kopek! It wasn’t that I especially liked those Turkish words. They were opportunities to pratice. Compelling opportunities. Watchout: Dog! (Big ole doggie dog. Dawg.)

There was one word in particular that I mumbled low to myself, lovestruck, as if it were a poem, that I prided myself on finally being able to say since my whole Turkish language class stumbled on it: Zincirlikuyu, a neighborhood in Istanbul. It’s simply a gorgeous word, like Zimbabwe. I would say and say and say it: Zincirlikuyu, Zincirlikuyu, imagining that I’d someday be able to have enough nerve to utter it to a taxi driver, or anyone for that matter, because once put to the test out in public the real tricky words would invariably have you flat out on your American foreign-language-learning rump.

But now we’re back Stateside, and we have Pea-Ay-zoh, which I certainly bounced around a few too many times to the kids. “Stop it, Mom!” Whatever.

I’m also now taking Spanish classes, wouldn’t you know it, and I love me this new one: abogado, lawyer. Soy abogado. I am a lawyer. (I’m not, actually, or couldn’t you tell?)

Dikkat! Kopek. Soy abogado en Zincirlikuyu.

Pea Ay zoh

After much hemming and (hee)hawing, though quite unlike a donkey I must say, and more akin to the nervous rat, I have finally launched this ole’ bird. My good friends Dave and Beth have hosted a blog for me for I think two years now, and it remained empty. But here, here I am lights on and oh-fficial.

So. Ok. Well now, that was fun. Thanks for coming y’all. You can get your coats at the coatcheck.

Launch notes:
Bill, Hubby, [as with all of the hairbrained ideas my husband gets himself knee-deep in for me: sculpture installations years ago, house reno, pets] : my loving thanks.

Presently, like a pig rolling in that barnyard cocktail of whathaveyou, me.