New Book Review

Check out A.S. new book review, below: "What is the What" by Dave Eggers.

E-mail your book, film, or music review to me for publication on this page. We all benefit from the recommendations. My "Must Read" list is growing already. . .

Sesame Street Deserted, Gentrified and Bought by Private Company

This morning Merry has a cold and we are all at home. And so we sat sniffling around the kitchen table eating pancakes and listening to NPR's Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. If you've not listened to this hilarious show, a favorite section of ours consists of three stories--one is true, the rest are false. Today's true story recounted Ariel's "Sweet Sixteen Birthday Party" (broadcasted on MTV). Ariel's daddy throws her an immorally lavish bash, exposing himself and his oil fields to publicity; now you can read about the scandal in The Arizona Republic: Ariel's generous papa is on the news for "fraudulently promoting oil and gas investments in Kentucky." Investors feel grumpy about their money being invested in a brand-new BMW for little princess Ariel. But Ariel seems like a typical sixteen year old girl; she believes in the inherent worth of her father and of oil both: "My dad owns his own oil company. He has oil wells all over the world. I love oil. Oil means shoes and cars and purses," Ariel said on the show, which aired Monday. "So it sets me apart from everybody else in this town. . . . It smells like money, Daddy!"

You can find all the endless horror on sweet sixteen birthday parties on the MTV site. Or you can just watch MTV. Or our kids can watch MTV and dream of big bashes of their own.

What is happening to our culture? I know, I know, there are excesses in every culture, historically, all over the world. But the great excesses of our culture, and particularly our youth culture, deeply disturb me. There seems to be a growing sense of entitlement among American youth in general. And the problem goes much deeper than a mere feeling of deservedness. The problem is, our youth do not know what they truly deserve any more.

Children do not deserve cars, or cellphones, or a glittering social life among their peers. They do not deserve to feel comfortable all the time or to even be happy. They should not expect easy answers or facile outcomes. Youth should not feel they are the centre of their culture or the universe in general, nor should they expect an easy flow of material goods. They are not entitled to an easy education; they are not entitled to rewards.

What do our youth deserve? They deserve to be servants. They deserve to work hard and then to realize small but enduring benefits for their work. They deserve a love of learning, brought by discomforting, hard labor. What can we give our children? Not more things. We can give our children good conversation, the wisdom of the aged, knowledge of books. Our children deserve lives based on truth and realities that occasionally make them feel sad or disquieted.

I propose an alternative show to "Sweet Sixteen." Instead of taking in the frills and arsenic-laced whipped cream of excess, we could instead educate ourselves on the realities of an economically and socially torn world: a sixteen- year old orphaned by AIDS, caring for her siblings and grateful for what little education she can receive. A sixteen-year old sold into the sex trade by her desperately poor parents. A sixteen-year old conscripted into military work. A sixteen-year old who is the sole survivor of terrorist attacks in Iraq.

Oh, wait--are we at war? I had forgotten.

And God forbid we impress our youth with the reality of who they are in the world, and what work they must undertake to make our culture, and our world, a better place.

And education--what is that these days other than a product-line? Don't our youth deserve good jobs that will make them loads of money? Isn't success based on our professions, and our paychecks, and how much we are able to afford? What is learning but a means to an end?

Our society will collapse, piece by piece, if we do not give our children what they truly deserve.

I'm not waving the flag of socialism here. I'm not planning to strip my daughters of all their toys and give them sawdust pallets to sleep on. I'm not suggesting labor camps. I am certainly not advocating a loss of childhood. I believe in childhood, and I believe it is full of wonder--and chores, responsibilities, discipline, learning by experience, real conversation and silence and respect.

But I want to give, as much as I am able, a real life to my children. I want them to be unafraid to encounter and react to suffering. I want them to be compassionate and delight in all that is truly and deeply real. I want them to have wonderful imaginations, imaginations that give them faith to believe what is unseen and good.

_______________________________________________
What does this have to do with Sesame Street?

I love Sesame Street--it is clever, robust programming. I love the good services that CPB (Corporation for Public Broadcasting) delivers to children all over the US, without advertising and meaningless fillers. To me, CPB is a sign of health in our media morass. NPR is a bright spot in my daily routine and offers true education and responsible perspective.

And in the midst of our wildly disproportionate defense spending, not to mention controversial programs such as "No Child Left Behind" and our immoral health care messes (just to name a few concerns), the House has once again targeted CPB: "On a party-line vote, the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees health and education funding approved the cut to the budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes money to the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. It would reduce the corporation's budget by 23 percent next year, to $380 million, in a cut that Republicans said was necessary to rein in government spending." (For a great illustration on government spending, see the Cookie Site).

And who loses? Our children. Again. And so society suffers: the cuts would force the network to "drastically reduce the programming and services public television and public radio can provide to local communities," as well as cutting funding and thus obliterating 'Ready to Learn,' a literacy TV program, and online teaching resource `Ready to Teach' (The Boston Globe 2006).

But don't worry. If our children want good programming, they can always find "Sweet Sixteen" on MTV. MTV doesn't depend on the government for its funding, and guess what? It's doing just fine. Big Bird may have to register for food stamps, but MTV will not suffer. Hey, maybe Big Bird could actually get a beak-job and have his own show.

My sense of unreality grows. As Marvin Gaye put it, WHAT'S GOING ON?

CONTRIBUTOR REVIEW: What is the What by Dave Eggers

What is the What
Dave Eggers
McSweeneys, 2006



Dave Eggers’s “What is the What” follows the first-person account of a “lost boy” from Sudan, who lives in Atlanta at present. The book is nearly nonfiction—based on a real person of the same name—but in building the narrative Eggers played with facts enough to call it a novel; this twist of truth makes the 400+ pages an especially compelling read. Eggers does away with his typically profane style of writing to present Achak raw and gentle, full of faith that eventually gives way to doubt.

In Achak’s bare English, at once formal and poetic, the story of Sudan’s civil war and one man’s life will shatter you.

--Reviewed by Amy Scheer

Besides her day jobs as freelance writer and mother, Amy Scheer is a prolific editorial letter writer. Most recently, her letters have appeared in Newsweek and Time. Amy lives with her composer-husband and two jolly sons in Grand Rapids, MI. Favorite past-times include sipping East African tea.

Feminist Reading of Boneheads, Stegosaurs

As we flipped through Usborne's "First Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Life," Merry took in the pictures of fast-running, sharp-clawed, dagger-toothed dinosaurs. Meat eaters, made to rip and shred and ingest one another. Merry's mouth gaped. Suddenly she asked,

"Are WE meat?"


I have to admit, I am not a dino-fan. But Merry was rivited as we turned page after page of endless saurases. And then the text began to tickle my funny-bone.

Read the following exerpts with a feminist lens and see if they're not funny:

"Stegosaurs were big and heavy, and could only move slowly. . .Their bodies were almost as big as a bus, but their brains were the size of table-tennis ball." Here you can see the size of a stegosaur's brain compared with its body. (insert picture here of huge animal with teenytiny brain).

And my all-time favorite. Boneheads: "Pachycephalosaurs [had] bony domes on top of their heads. These dinosaurs are sometimes known as boneheads."

(And my favorite line:) "Male boneheads sometimes fought each other."

So the world evolved. But some things never changed.

New Book Review by Rice Eater Below

A new book review has arrived! Check it out below--Rice Eater from CT reviewed "Zoom."

Daughters, Body Parts, Facts of Life

Gender issues--they start early. Elspeth is still utterly unaware that she is female. At one year old, people are big or small, but they are all to be played with and smiled at, though Elspeth more readily trusts smaller people and has a distinct aversion to people with beards, male or female.

But at five, Merry is already very aware of gender and many of the things that go with it. Though we try hard never to ascribe roles to gender or typify boys or girls, Merry has figured a few things on her own.

Boys do not generally wear dresses. Despite the history I gave her on women's rights and how women had to fight to wear pants, Merry steadfastly refuses to wear anything but dresses. Boys and girls have different physical characteristics. Boys are often more physically rough than girls--Merry believes this beyond a doubt, since she has personal experience to back up this belief: she has been bitten, pushed, her hair pulled, jostled, etc.--almost entirely by boys. When she was just four, this history of violence made Merry immediately wary of boys, and if there were any on the playground, she hung back in terror and clung to me for dear life. We explained to her that many boys were gentle and fun to play with. She did not believe us.

Since then she's had a few key male friends, and she has started to trust the male race a little more. So much so that today when Martin picked her up from preschool, she announced she had made friends with Richard and Devin. Two boys, in point of fact.

Martin was pleased, and mentioned in the course of conversation, "Boys and girls sometimes play differently, don't they?"

"Yes," said Merry, "Because they have different bottoms." She was of course referring to the undeniable fact that boys have penises and girls have vaginas.

She has known this for a long, long time, way back when she was two. And then, when she was three, she started to make use of her knowledge. The following scene took place a year and a half ago in Iowa.

_____________________________
My friend Amy and I sat at the table near the window, chatting over a book we had read, as her son Theo ate chalk and bobbed his head happily. Her four year old Simon and my three year old Merry sat on high stools at the breakfast bar, rolling play dough. Their voices suddenly raised to a high pitch:

“No, you don’t!” Merry yelled, her lips pursed and her eyes narrowed.

At intervals, Simon was grinning and then frowning in a perplexed way. “Yes, I do, Merry,” he murmured, studying a green piece of play dough plastered to his fingernail.

Merry put her chin in the air, smiling slyly. “No, you don’t,” she proclaimed again. She banged down a cookie cutter on the counter to emphasize her superior knowledge.

This exchange went on for some time. Amy and I paused our conversation, trying to understand what our two kids were ragging on about. Finally, Amy leaned toward me.

“I think Merry is telling him that he does not have a penis,” she said.

“Merry,” I yelled over my shoulder, “Simon does have a penis.”

Merry stopped mid-shout. “Oh,” she said, and shrugged. “Okay.”

Simon lowered his head to look at her. “I—I told you I had one,” he stuttered, relieved.
_____________________________
When I was about eight, it occurred to me that babies had to come from somewhere, just as a cake emerged from mixing a certain set of ingredients. So I asked my father. I expected a facile answer.

My father was standing over the sink, cleaning his razor. He told me: “The daddy gives something special to the mommy.”

“How?” I pursued.

My father stopped talking, and a pregnant silence followed. Finally he said, “We’ll tell you soon.”

For a day, I imagined the most awful things I thought possible: does the mother eat something gross from the father? Do they exchange saliva? Nasty! I never guessed--I could never have guessed--the horrifying truth.

My mother broke sex wide open for me the next evening. I was in the bath with my two-year old brother. She explained, concisely and graphically, what baby-making was. I looked at her, a washcloth hanging limply in my hands, my face and insides contorted with disgust. Why would God make such a thing necessary in order for the creation of babies? The splashing of my naked brother suddenly sounded very loud in the quiet of our bathroom.
______________________________________
Later in the car, Simon reviewed his conversation with Merry. First he reaffirmed the fact that he did indeed have a penis. And then Simon asked Amy: “So what does Merry have?”

His mother told him, and Simon asked what a vagina looked like. His mother struggled to explain, and after she had finished Simon was quiet for a moment. “Will Merry grow a penis?” he finally asked.

And on our end, Merry also continued the discussion. “Mommy,” she said casually, “Simon has a penis.”

“Yes, he does,” I said. “And what do you have?”

“A vagina,” she answered.

I am glad Merry knows the proper names for body parts, and it is natural she should notice differences between the bearers of those two body parts. All the same, I am glad to wait for a few years before Merry asks me for more specifics. The gender issues have started already, and it's early enough.

CONTRIBUTOR REVIEW: ZOOM BY ISTVAN BANYAI

Zoom
by Istvan Banyai
Puffin Books, 1995

A wordless meditation on perspective, Istvan Banyai's 31 page picture-poetry
provokes this what-if: you and I are the farm hands on the plastic toy set
of a magazine cover shoot held in the hand of a boy sitting by the pool-side
of a advertisement of a cruise line on the side of the bus in a giant city
being viewed through the television screen in the middle of a desert on the
postage stamp of a letter sent to Mr. Taumata Tafia, Tribal Chief of the
Solomon Islands?

Whimsical fancy or existential angst? It's worth the look, either way.

--Reviewed by Rice Eater who lives for the moment in New Haven, CT. Rice Eater is finishing a PhD from Yale in Political Science and will be teaching at The New School in New York City next year. Rice Eater has two lovely little girls and a wonderful spouse. Rice Eater occasionally, but not often, eats noodles.

Free Loving Dogs*

They Could be Yours to a Good Home: Free Loving Dogs

Names: Marmaduke and Chloe
Licensed Alsatian Wolfhounds

Both beautiful dogs come with stamped papers and engraved collars that bear their names and the slogan Make Love, Not War.

Both Marmaduke and Chloe can howl along to Pete Seeger's If I Had a Hammer.

Both dogs can stand on their hind legs and gyrate in time to Blowing in the Wind. Chloe prefers Dylan's rendition, while Marmaduke is a Peter, Paul and Mary fan.

Marmaduke is accustomed to ground beef while Chloe appreciates a little marijuana mixed into her Puppy Chow, “to take off the edge.” She is just a tad high-strung.

Free Loving Dogs Marmaduke and Chloe come with their own puppy beds as well as their own PEACE insignias. Marmaduke drives a VW Van. Chloe has made the curtains for the VW Van. Both dogs are talented and well behaved, though they do tend to wander into neighbor’s yards to visit other dogs if not chained.



*The title of this blog appeared as an e-mail from our town's FREECYCLE service. Martin begged me to write a blog in response. Less tempting for us was the "Free Loving Hamsters" that someone was trying to fob off. How many rodents does one family need, after all?

Ash Wednesday

At 6:30, it was still light. After what seems like weeks of smudgy grey, the sky was creamy as the inside of a shell, striated with faint pinks. An airplane silently left a perfect contrail, white like a child's chalkmark. Elspeth had been out of sorts all day but now she was quiet and nestled close to me, her hand unfurled on my arm. The snow outside had all but melted completely. The brittle edges of winter had given way to a quiet softness.


I had meant to mull over Ash Wednesday; I had meant to walk into and explore the phrase Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. That phrase and the accompanying smear of ashes has haunted me for years. I first truly encountered its power while teaching at a Jesuit high school. At mass that day I watched students filing past me, shadowed with a cross of ashes, their mortality. They didn't know it. They chatted and whispered behind their hands as they filed back to their seats. But judgement, inevitable death, yelled from their foreheads. The smooth young flesh that covered their cheekbones would one day fall away, and they would return to dust.

Later my first born child was marked with ashes. She too will die someday, as will I and my husband and my second daughter. So will my parents, and my siblings and all my friends. We have been formed out of earth-dust. We walk in young bodies and laugh with quick mouths. We burble with life like rivers. Sometimes when all is most happy, in the silence that follows a burst of laughter, in the quiet when somebody I love leaves, there is an echo, a shadow that never goes away: "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

Reading the prayer book today I was glad to remember that you, God, who are everlasting, "hates nothing you have made." And indeed as I sat in the rocking chair, holding Elspeth in my arms, a pervading sense of peace filled my hair, my mouth, every particle of my flesh, with warmth. I felt, as I often did as a child, that the evening had been created for me especially.

As an adult I see rationally that believing that an evening, or a storm, or an early morning, has been created specifically for one person is crazy. Thinking of it critically, I feel embarrassed, as when I wave warmly and energetically at someone only to find they were not waving at me but someone behind me. But I can't shake the feeling. And is it so odd to believe in something ludicrous?

Is it not ludicrous that we, who are somehow and mysteriously infinite should also decay into a world that was born and will also die?

I don't know how it all works. I know Ash Wednesday makes me sad, and that is right enough. I know too that time and flesh, body and spirit are much more than we can begin to imagine. Listen to the mysteries in this last breath of Ash Wednesday: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace.

Thank God for mystery; for the ashes of cooled fires and the infinite sky. I thank God for the curve of my husband's shoulder, the foreheads of my children, the grasp of my friend's fingers. For wet grass, the cries of birds and the glimmer of water. For voices. Thank you.

Note

Note: Below, find the first book review for this blog, submitted by me (Kim) this morning. If you're not interested in the book reviews, simply skip over them to my personal posts below.

BOOK REVIEW: The Twelve Little Cakes by Dominika Dery

The Twelve Little Cakes
Dominika Dery
published 2004 by Riverhead Books

Charming Memoir, Fast Read

The Twelve Little Cakes is a charming memoir about little six year old Dominika's childhood in 1970s communist Czechoslovakia. The story's conflicts stem from the status of Dominkika's parents as poilitical dissidents: Father Jarda is always being fired from jobs by the Secret Police; Mother Janna's parents have disowned their family; little Dominika suffers the close scrutiny of her community.

I found the landscape and historical setting of the memoir fascinating, especially since Dery is only two years older than I. Dery's courageous family is sketched insightfully--her father Jarda is an especially lovable lunatic who at one point skis down a mountain with a St. Benard on his back.

Dery captures a child's perspective well in the precocious character of Dominika. The writing is light and often humorous even when the subject is dark; Jarda and Janna do not hide hard facts from their daughter.

Chapter Seven, "The Little Indian," about the quarantine ward at Bulovka Hospital, and Nine, "The Little Yolk Wreath," about Dominika's early religious experiences, are especially captivating.

Spend a few pleasant evenings with a tumbler of home-brewed gin and Dery's book. The writing itself is not particularly fine or tightly strung, but that suits the book's tone. This is Dery's first book in English, and it is worth reading.

--Reviewed by Kim Cockroft

BOOKS, REVIEW EM AND SHARE EM

HELP!

Friends: BOOKS! Some of them put me to sleep [Anthony Trollope's 'Barchester Towers']; some of them are easy and delightful [D. Dery's 'the Twelve Little Cakes'], and some I never finish even though they are fantastic [Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children'--I do plan on finishing].

I am always on the look-out for a great book to read, and I know my friends are, too. I wish you all would jot off a couple lines on books you're reading. If you only have a couple lines to write, that's fantastic--the reviews do not need to be in-depth or professional. My father, for instance, reads books like most people eat popcorn, on long overseas flights. My sister reads books while she does just about everything except showering, and my friend Jeff always has a good tidbit to share with me, such as the jack ass and Robert Louis Stevenson, which is now on my list.

I just want to know what books you're reading, and whether I should read them, too.

If you've just read a book you'd like to review, e-mail it to me and I'll post it on this page. To access the book reviews, click on the BOOK REVIEWS label on the list of TOPICS at right. Then others will be able to share your book knowledge and recommendations.

If you want to include links to other reviews, please do so, and I'll post those as well.

Here's to books!

My Father is a Feminist

After staying up too late last night reading Wendell Berry's novel, "Hannah Coulter," in which the protagonist grows up working hard on a farm, going to bed exhausted from manual labor and rising early, I awakened around 7:30, longing for a sleep-in and coffee. Merry was singing a song at my elbow; Elspeth was alternately chewing on my nipple and crawling on my head. I stumbled downstairs and immediately and grumpily began taking stock of my husband's shortcomings. (My husband loves and looks forward to this pasttime of mine). He had not swept the floor or washed the cookie sheet from the night before; he had not fixed me coffee; he had not changed Elspeth's diaper. Never mind that he had cooked dinner the night before and cleaned the kitchen, or that he had fed Elspeth breakfast.

After a good strong cup of coffee, I was able to find my inner reason and begin again my internal discussion of feminism. What does it mean to be a daily feminist? Does it mean ticking off household duties, weighing out who did what and deciding whether I am succumbing to prescribed roles? My brother-in-law has pointed out that the women in my family talk hard feminism but love their men. Well, the two are not exclusive. Gentleness and feminism are not by any means contradictions of each other. And being a feminist does not mean that women are grouchy people or militants, though they jolly well have equal rights to those two things! But the point is, nobody, regardless of who they are, has the right to treat another person badly.

I grew up with the best parents possible. My mother was a feminist in every true meaning of the word; she consistently instilled in her daughters self-respect, determination, and idealism backed by the practice of hard work. She pooh-poohed moodiness, never gave stock to self-pity, and expected us to work hard and hold fast to true ideas of ourselves. Under her guidance, I never doubted for a minute that I was inherently worthwhile and strong. She generally espoused the notion I recently heard in "Mary Poppins," that while men with exceptional character can individually be adored, "as a race they're rather stupid." She did not encourage false vanity and even laughed at it but always, always affirmed that we were beautiful not because of how we appeared, but because of who we were, deep down. Nothing could change that, no matter what people said about us or did to us.

My father is a gentle, soft-spoken, easy-going humble man who works hard, thinks well, succeeds quietly, and loves us all with a deep, abiding tenderness. I have never heard or seen disrespectful behavior from him, especially regarding women. He takes a lot of flack and criticism from my sister and I, but he knows we are proud of him and hold him up as an impossible ideal for all men.

The point is, my parents are more who they are than what they do. My father has his PhD in public health and is a writer; my mother is a powerful speaker and has her Masters of Christian Education, which she took course by course with Kenyan classmates when I was in high school in Nairobi and enjoyed every minute of it. Both my mother and father are self-sacrificial. Both expect and value self-discovery and individual pursuit in each other, and share and nurture newness in each other. Both value family over everything else; both profess to love each other more than they love us, emphasizing that this is the way to love us best. They are not perfect, though I often thought they were. Their marriage is not perfect, though there is far more to admire and emulate in their partnership than to criticize.

My mother is a feminist, and my father is also a feminist. And how could a daughter ask for more?

I wish I could say I fell in love with my husband Martin at first sight. I did not. But I did fall for him at second sight, which is almost as good. After our second meeting, and after just one kooky, wonderful conversation, I told my roommate I had found the man of my dreams. Martin's mind and manner were the first draw; after that I found out he was a musician and a writer. I understood always that he was exceptionally kind in the deepest way. I didn't think much of his poetry at first, but as the years passed I began to think he was an excellent poet. It is handy to be married to a fellow writer, and it is good to be married to a life-long learner and a gentle person. When we married, we discussed children and decided that when we had them, we would both work part-time and stay home part-time. I can say in perfect honesty that Martin would have been happy to stay home full-time while I went out to work.

And then Merry came along. Martin was in graduate school and I was teaching English at the Jesuit high school in Missoula, MT. After my maternity leave, I went back to work, leaving Merry at home with Martin during the day. After work, I came home, Martin passed off baby like a baton and went on to his evening classes. It was miserable. Every time I stepped outside to walk to work, I felt as if I were ripping out my heart and leaving it bleeding in the doorway. Once I was at work, I enjoyed teaching my classes. But I couldn't shake the thought of all I was missing, with Merry changing quickly and still just an infant.

To make the separation harder, Merry refused to take my bottled breastmilk and cried all day, so Martin began rushing her in for feedings during my breaks. I barely saw Martin. We quickly realized this was no way to live.

And then I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I wanted to stop working at the high school and stay home with Merry. I longed for it so much that I categorically insisted that this must be. Martin felt a bit double-crossed, since we had discussed childrearing and agreed that we would share it evenly. "I don't care what I said then," I told him, "This is how I feel now." And so Martin sacrificed for me, and found a full-time job, and I got my heart's desire and stayed with Merry.

This is what the partnership of marriage is about: a life-style of mutuality and self-sacrifice. We have followed Martin's vocation to many different places, and though I take my vocation with me wherever I go (parenting at 'home' and writing), moving in pursuit of his job prospects has involved hard work and sacrifice from me. But it is mutual, and it is based on choice, and that is truly liberating.

I am baffled by women who talk as if they exist purely for the whim of their spouses. "Poor so-and-so," they'll say, referring to their husbands, "I haven't put on lipstick all week." And then, often in the same breath, they berate their spuses and denounce them as demanding and unreasonable devils.

I do not dress, or wear make-up, or do anything purely for Martin's benefit, anymore than he does everything for my benefit. To do so would be unhealthy, because acting in such a way would put unrealistic expectations upon each other. I do not wait around for Martin to fulfill all my needs. He does not depend upon me for his self-worth. If Martin died, God forbid, I would suffer, but I would not stop being a whole person with high expectations of myself and my daughters. And I would jolly well keep putting on clothes to please myself and nobody else.

What Martin says, or does, cannot change the person I am at the core of my being. And vice-versa. At the same time, we expect and celebrate all the things that we mutually contribute to each other and to our family. We realize that we are a small community of sorts, made to exist within a larger community. We realize and affirm that our love for one another must sometimes, and often, involves self-denial.

But true feminism does not come from a series of things I do, or what my profession is (though who a person is and what they do dynamically affects each other). True feminism comes from inside me, from a deep, unchanging well of self-respect and faith that I am whole, worthwhile, and capable. This is an ideal that I wish for everyone I love, male and female. It is a reality that I am constantly reminding myself of and working towards.

Tomorrow, I want to think more about feminism and its practical implications for my daughters.

But now my Elspeth is awake and typing with one hand while I breastfeed with the other is proving tricky. (Note to self: You chose this.) Right-o! So I did! Hallelujah!

Hot-dogs Don't Tell Tales

At intervals, the sizzling Hebrew National hot-dogs smelled of wet dog and incense. I hoped they were still good. My windows and doors were locked. Nobody would know I was feeding myself, and my daughter Merry, non-organic, unhealthy, bizarre meatstuffs.

Martin and I are semi-vegetarian, semi-organic foodies. We had a brief romance with vegetarianism, during which Martin ate fillet-o-fish at McDonalds and we realized we were part-time carnivores at heart after all. I read enough information on little beef-fed girls who bud breasts and develop cancer to scare me meatless. One of our friends based his doctoral thesis on undercover work in a meat processing plant in the midwest. His stories were enough to make you plant your own bean crop in the back yard. So we compromised. When we are at home, we eat only organic, natural and hormone free, or local meat, and we don't eat that very often (who could afford to?) We feed the girls and lactating me only organic, hormone-free milk.

And generally speaking, I publicly denounce hot-dogs.

But I have a secret passion for Hebrew-National, so much so that this year during the superbowl at my parents house, when my mother sent away an unopened package of Hebrew National Franks with my brother and his girlfriend, I disgraced myself by throwing a mini temper tantrum.

--Those were SPECIAL, I hissed, as my brother's girlfriend disappeared to put on her coat. --Those were SPECIAL TREATS.

My mother shrugged as if to remind me that my little brother lives in an almost-condemned house, works hard, and most importantly, is my blood relation, after all.

--We still have the other package, she said, referring to the sorry buy-one-get-one-free, preservative-packed, non-kosher mystery dogs in our refrigerator.

--He doesn't even CARE about his health, I complained, holding an invisible cigarette in my fingers. Besides smoking, my brother does horrible things like eating frozen Jimmy Dean sausage sandwiches.

--I saved one of the Hebrew National for Merry, my mother pointed out, just before my brother and his girlfriend reappeared. I banished my pout until they were safely in the cold air, plastic sack in hand--containing not only the whole package of expensive kosher hot-dogs but the rest of the salt and vinegar kettle-cooked chips! Double-whammy.

When I came back home from my parents house with the girls, Martin had a surprise in store for me. Nestled in our rickety, twenty-year old refrigerator drawer, not one, but two Hebrew National hot-dog packages smiled up at me. I have shared this secret with nobody. When our friends came for lunch and Merry mentioned the possibility of hot-dogs, their mother, a vegan, pooh-poohed.

--Oh, no, she said. --I don't think your mother would have hot dogs.

I did not admit my secret and shameful cache but instead shoveled Trader Joe's macaroni and cheese onto her children's plates. I saved the Hebrew National for quiet afternoons, like lunchtime today. It did not matter to me that they smelled odd as they cooked.

As we waited for them to pockmark deliciously in the pan, Merry read me the book she had created this morning out of green construction paper, called "The Cornia Tales."

--This is a tale about Merry, the artist, Cocoa the famous doctor, and Elephant, the farmer,
she began.

She went on, undeterred by Elspeth, who was making a sound like a blocked vacuum cleaner with every bite of natural, dye-free noodles.

--Sometimes Elephant did bad things, but Merry forgave him anyway, Merry continued, holding up the picture for me to see. And then the book abruptly ended. The hot-dogs were blackened and smelled delicious. I slid one onto her plate.

--I don't think that book has enough narrative tension, I pointed out.

Merry picked up her hot-dog and licked it.--Yes it does, she argued.--It has narrative tension because sometimes Elephant does bad things. Also, it's only the first book.

--Good, I said, and bit into my lovely, hot, tasty, clandestine Hebrew National hot-dog. I finished it quickly and with gusto. Within minutes of the last bite, I doubled over with a stomach cramp.

Merry looked up from her hot-dog, which she was nibbling slowly and deliberately. "Maybe you'll throw up it," she said.

And here's the real source of narrative tension: the things we claim publicly and proudly; the things we actually do in secret; and the consequences when the first two do not meet. Call it the ego and the id, if you will. I call it a stomach cramp. But guess what? The cramp passed, and I squirreled the rest of the Hebrew National hot-dogs safely away in our cheese drawer. They wait there for another quiet afternoon. And they aren't telling any tales.