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Zoning quirks.

A number of people, some in my area, were surprised by my comment in the last post that we can't legally finish our basement in Minneapolis.

Lemme  'splain.  

• Our lot is zoned R1A:  residential, single-family.  
• R1A properties are zoned for a minimum lot size of 5,000 square feet and a minimum floor area ratio of (habitable floor area)/(lot area) = 0.5 .
• The lot is nonconforming, only 4800 square feet.
•  All the other lots in the neighborhood are also nonconforming, because they were created before the current minimum lot size went into effect. 
• Nonconforming properties are not the same as "illegal properties."  A great deal of properties in Minneapolis are nonconforming, because the zoning changes all the time.
• Just because a property is nonconforming doesn't mean you can't sell it (without an issue) or live in it.
• They do create an issue for new building permits. You have to get a variance from the city to pull a permit for creating anything that is new that will not conform to the zoning code. 
• We had to do that in 2005 when we split the lot we owned from 9600 square feet to 4800 square feet -- even though all the neighboring lots are also 4800 square feet, we had to get a variance to create two new lots < 5000 square feet each.   (We built our current house in 2006 on one of the two smaller lots, and sold the other lot along with the house we lived in previously.)
• We do not have a variance for the minimum floor area ratio on our lot.
• In R1A at this time no building permit will be issued without a variance for a new multifamily dwelling (even though the neighborhood is full of duplexes).
• Similarly, no building permit will be issued for a new dwelling that would have a habitable floor area > 0.5 (lot area). 
• And no building permit will be issued without a variance for any construction that will expand the habitable floor area past the minimum floor area ratio.  So our home is limited to 2400 square feet habitable space, even though many pre-existing homes don't conform to this and can legally be sold with no trouble.
• In the past few years the rules were stringently tightened up for awarding variances. 
• If we were trying to get the same variance we got in 2005 to split our old double lot today, we probably would not be allowed to, and building the house we own would not be possible.
• Obviously it is possible to finish the basement on our own without pulling a permit and thereby coming to the city's attention. 
• But it isn't legal.  

That's the story.

This post is so I won't forget.

I am coming off an almost golden weekend, chiefly because I got enough sleep.  

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But perhaps the causality is not quite so simple.  Here's another data point:  Two weekends ago I also got plenty of sleep.  The last waking act I committed was, on Friday afternoon, to make a pot of chicken soup*, and then -- as soon as Mark got home -- I crawled into bed with a box of tissues and a bag of cough drops and stayed there until, oh, three or four o'clock on Sunday.  I did emerge, wrapped in a blanket, to watch Blue's Clues with the 2-year-old while everyone else went to Mass.

It was great.  I love it when I'm just sick enough to stay in bed and not be bothered, and there's actually someone else around to take care of everyone else and make it possible.  There's something wonderfully decadent about feeling just bad enough to justify spending the day in bed, and it's truly a luxury to be able to afford it -- because of a background of good health and another adult in the family who can take over for a couple of days.

I thought a lot about Jen Fulwiler during those hours, counting my blessings and offering them up.  I'd have offered my sufferings, what with being sick and all, but as you can see I was enjoying it far too much to make that possible.

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Again, that was two weekends ago.   I wrote on Facebook that my second superpower is, apparently, the ability to get sick on Friday afternoon and be up and about by Monday morning.**   But this past weekend I still felt kind of draggy, draggy enough that I rolled over and went back to sleep when my Saturday morning alarm went off.  

That's a big deal.  Normally I flee the house on Saturday mornings, desperate for a few hours to myself.  The thought of an omelette and a bottomless cup of coffee and a Wi-fi connection in a busy Lyndale Avenue café that opens at 6:30 a.m. is plenty motivation for me to roll out of bed and get started on a string of solitary errands.  Not this weekend.  I didn't wake up until 8:30 when children were jumping on me. 

So I got up, and Mark made coffee, and I made waffles and topped them with my stealthily-purchased, carefully-hdden half-pint of fresh blueberries.  As I munched on my waffles, I pondered the lovely feeling of having slept until late in the morning.  Over the waffles I made a deal with Mark that we would go to Mass at five o'clock and then we would sleep in on Sunday, which meant that I had to run my errands (and go to the gym, and have lunch) in a space of about four hours.  

He agreed, and offered to do the quarterly big-box discount-store dry-goods shopping while I was gone.  Now that's a good husband.

I ran some errands (library, office supply store), went to the gym and ran three miles, and then took myself out for a Vietnamese iced coffee and a killer bowl of bún bò Huế  for a late lunch at Quang.  It had to be done.  

(Man, if I ever move away from this town, one thing I'm going to miss are the Vietnamese restaurants.  Never lived in a town that had so many good ones, unless you count Lyon -- and back then I was distracted by other food.  Vietnamese restaurants are so well-integrated here that it's not terribly unusual to see bánh mì sandwiches on lunch menus among the reubens and bacon cheeseburgers.)

I made it back home in time to help put the paper towels and dish soap and toothbrush family-packs away, and then we went to Mass in time to send those who wanted to go into Confession first, and then it was back home for a late supper of falafel-from-a-box and coleslaw.  Mark and I split a big Belgian-style ale*** and stayed up late.  

And that ---  letting the dinner dishes sit and the children run away to play video games while the two of us kill a bottle together --- is about as good as domestic bliss gets around here.

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Sunday was for sleeping in.  I sent a child to fetch bacon from the basement freezer, and we made enough so that everyone could have LOTS (three whole strips!), plus I baked a batch of cinnamon drop biscuits -- read, ordinary drop biscuits with extra sugar and cinnamon added, and more sprinkled on top, so that no one felt the need to drown them in honey.  I don't think we had breakfast till 10:15, which is CRAZY.  

 I sat around in my pajamas and read stories to kids.  Mark wandered around in a bathrobe with a cup of coffee and occasionally moved pieces around on the chessboard, which was spread out among the breakfast dishes.  After a while we wandered downstairs (I dragged a blanket with me to wrap myself in) and sat amongst the junk in our kid-cave, discussing plans for it.

See, we have a basement that's a sort of half-hearted kid-cave.  We've already hit the maximum finished square footage we are allowed by the city to have in our house, so we can't "finish the basement" (well, we could, but we'd be breaking the law).  There's some drywall up to separate the space into a pantry, a shop, and a kid-cave, and there's a big carpet scrap on the floor, and a pile of mattresses under a dozen or so climbing holds that Mark bolted to the wall, and a 10-year-old TV/DVD combo (with a cathode ray tube in it!)  and a bunch of shelves that are supposed to store toys but generally stand empty.

Our new project is to transform the basement into a better kid cave -- and here's the key -- without actually "finishing" it. In the legal sense.

So we made some plans -- drew them in pencil on the wall, because you can do that when your basement is unfinished -- for more climbing holds and a real climbing-wall mat and such -- and then we went upstairs and bought a flat-screen TV with a tilting wall mount, so we can get rid of the old TV and the shelves right away.  At least as soon as it gets here.

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Somewhere in there we ate cereal and crackers and canned kippers for lunch.  And then I did my school planning while everyone else cleaned up the kitchen.  And then we went out for cheeseburgers and fries so we wouldn't have to clean the kitchen again. and I ATE A WHOLE PLATTER OF CHEESEBURGER AND FRIES BECAUSE I DO THAT SOMETIMES AND IT WAS GOOD.  It was Surly Sunday at the cheeseburger place (think Five-Guys style, only locally owned and with local beer) and so I split a Furious with Mark and leaned back and felt the mild buzz and felt full of cheeseburger and beer and listened to the kids chattering about Mario Kart and DAMMIT I was happy.

And then we came back to my clean house and played board games with the kids until bedtime.

And I swear it does not get better than this, forever and ever amen.

 

 

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Footnotes:

*recipe here, except I didn't have any potatoes and used a can of hominy instead, and it turned out great

**My first superpower is the ability to decide, just in the nick of time, that I really need to check on the kids.  Once I found my two-year-old, and H.'s, having just dumped a 5-lb sack of sugar on the driveway, on their hands and knees just about to start licking it up.  

***technically, brewed by Samuel Adams, but it tasted fine with falafel-from-a-box

 

 

I am hiding in my room to write this post.

Man, do I hate the first couple of days back at school after a long break.

Yesterday we had our "reading day" to wean them off the steady diet of video games and TV they enjoyed during our extended stay at the g-parents'. No screen time except for the hour after lunch (the usual amount), but they could play or read or go outside -- whatever -- while I got my schoolroom back together and figured out what I needed to do next. That went fine.

Today I sat across the table from my 6- and 9-year-olds and watched -- exhorted -- declaimed -- pulled my hair out as each of them took TWO HOURS to do a math lesson that should have been about half an houris (20 minutes, tops, for the 6-yo). My 9-yo has just started a new 4th-grade book that eases into things, and the first section of his lesson was simply to write out eleven different numbers, some given in digits to be spelled out in words, some spelled out to be written in digits. He was given a chart with all the necessary words spelled out, and a list of the hyphenation rules to refer to.

Readers, this is not a child with a learning disability. Readers, it took me more than an hour to exhort him to finish this lesson-part, occasionally having to run after him and bring him back to his desk ("Oh, yeah! I have to do my math!"), and he STILL miscopied "ninty" for "ninety" AND left out all the hyphens.

And let's not talk about the 6-yo. Things weren't so different for her.

You know, I am never tempted to send the children to school. Really, I am not. For one thing, I have never done it, so I have no memories of a golden age when I got several hours of quiet time every day, or a chance to work for wages at a job among grownups. For another thing, I am perfectly aware that problems I can see happening before my own eyes might well slip under the radar of an instructor, however gifted, in a classroom of twenty-five children. For a third thing, I am quite intellectually convinced of the adequacy of homeschooling and of the reasons it is the best choice for our family.

But I am tempted to raid the pile of Christmas chocolates at tea-snack time and then hide upstairs under the guise of taking a loooooooong shower. Also to spend the day shrieking things like, "Do you KNOW how RIDICULOUS this is? Do you know you could have been done with this NINETY MINUTES AGO? What is going on? No, it isn't because you are bad at math, it is because you are CHOOSING not to SIT in your chair and DO it!"

Something about there being two children instead of one who are both pulling the same thing, right in front of me, is crazy-making. I can only "make" one of them work at a time. When I turn to one, the other twirls her chair, sneaks jawbreakers out of her desk and wanders off to look for scissors to open them with; when I notice she is gone and go after her, the first one starts drawing ninjas in the corner of his paper.

I hope this is a passing phase related to the "first week back" phenomenon. Because while I am not exactly tempted to quit, I am sorely tempted to cast about wildly for something, anything, that will "work," whether that is concomitant with my long-term goals and values or not.

Or just to give up and start drawing ninjas myself. Pass the chocolate.

Blub blub.

Here is an obscurely inconsequential Minneapolis item:  

Minneapolis voting precinct located entirely in a lake

Not one voter cast a ballot in one Minneapolis precinct on Election Day. That’s because the only living species in Ward 10, Precinct 3B, is of the aquatic variety.

A newly redistricted precinct map shows 3B is located entirely in the eastern half of Lake Calhoun — the biggest lake in Minneapolis. City Clerk Casey Carl says the watery precinct is the “unintentional result of a programming error” made in drawing new ward boundary lines.

Charter Commission chairman Barry Clegg tells the Star Tribune that the mapping software couldn’t draw a line around the edge of the lake without putting a census block in the wrong ward. Clegg says it was supposed to be cleaned up for the final map, but never was.

Perhaps they're just looking out for a very special contingency.  It's my observation that the population of the eastern half of Lake Calhoun increases significantly after the ice gets thick enough to drag an ice fishing house out there.

But generally, Minneapolis stays on top of things.  The error came to light when a reporter asked why nobody voted in 3B.

If you'd like to see the watery precinct, you can look at the map here.

 

Poison control update.

Remember that story about MJ getting pine sap in her eye, and I called poison control from camp, and all turned out well and we didn't have to drive 45 minutes to an ER, and my vacation was saved, and so I wrote a blog post wishing I could send cupcakes to the poison control center, and ChristyP made it happen via the wonders of social networks?

The Hennepin County Medical Center liked the story enough to ask me if I wouldn't mind contributing an edited version to their "Faces and Stories" section of their PR/advocacy site.  I didn't mind.  

If you go there today (11/12/12) you'll see my 9- and 6-year-olds in the photo on this month's "Featured Story."  They're fishing in the picture, because at the time I was calling Poison Control I was too busy to snap a photo of my screaming children for posterity.  So we went with "an outdoor activity involving eye protection" instead.

Also, you'll see a picture of the poison information provider getting his cupcakes!

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The story, "Delivering Care by Delivering Information," will fall off the front page eventually, and I'll replace the link then.

 

Intersections.

Minnesota Mom has a post with a couple of anecdotes, including this one:

 I was on my way to confession (not surprisingly) and Mass at the Cathedral, and at one of the stoplights there was a man with a sign.

There are often people at this particular intersection. Usually, we drive right past because my husband would rather give the money to charity. “I don’t want to fund their habit,” he says, and he’s right. Most of these people want a few bucks for cheap booze…but we don’t really know and when you’re stopped right there…

I just felt guilty and awkward for not acknowledging him. 

I took a dollar bill from my purse and rolled down the window. The man hoisted himself to his feet—he had a cane—and proceeded to stagger over. He was really, really staggering and I thought, “Oh great. He is drunk and I’m an enabler.” 

Then he fell on the grass and tried to get back up. 

He fell again. He couldn’t do it. 

“Just…just give it to me!” he muttered, embarrassed, but I really couldn’t reach him and felt awful—just awful. The light turned green and there was a line behind me. I opened the door. I grasped his hand and pulled him up. 

As I got back in the car and drove away—my heart nearly exploding in my chest—I thought two things. One, I thought about how soft that poor man’s hand had been, and how tightly he grasped mine when I extended it. 

Click over to read the rest if you like.

Is there anyone in the city who doesn't have an encounter like this once in a while, with the guilty looking-away?  I don't have all the answers, and I don't always live up to my convictions (read:  I pretty often don't.)

But some time ago I found some of the answers in Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI's first encyclical which was released on Christmas Day in 2005 (and which I didn't get around to reading until a year and a half later).

Reading it gave me the conviction that even if you are certain it's better not to give handouts to beggars, the one thing we may not do is refuse to acknowledge them.

Look people in the eye. Smile or nod. If you're not behind a car window, say "Hi" or "Good morning," the way you would to any stranger you pass on the sidewalk.

That can be really hard to do when you've already decided you aren't going to give him or her any money or food, or if your pockets are empty, but pretending a person isn't there is simply not an option for the Christian.

If you feel ashamed to look someone in the eye and not to give him what he asks, I guess you're just going to have to feel ashamed, possibly right along with the man or woman who has the sign.  

It won't kill you.  

These are the words of Matthew 5:42, which comes after the Beatitudes, between the teachings on retaliation and the teachings on loving your enemies:

Give to the one who asks of you, and do not turn your back on the one who wants to borrow.

It doesn't say "Give anyone who asks of you exactly what they are asking for," and it doesn't say "Lend to everyone who wants to borrow." It says "Give" and it says "Do not turn your back."  

It doesn't tell you exactly what to give, but one would think that giving nothing at all, not even a kind look, has been definitively ruled out.  One would think turning away, so as not to have to see the cardboard sign, to be out of the question.

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(I wrote about this at greater length back in 2007 when I had just finished reading Deus Caritas Est.  Here's that post, which includes quotes from the document to support my discussion.)

Six degrees to cupcakes.

When I was pregnant with my second child, I read a simple line in a parenting book (Becky Bailey, Easy to Love, Difficult to Discipline) that resonated with me: 

"In any given moment, ask yourself, do you want to be special, or do you want to connect?"  

As a child and adolescent, I had wanted to be special more than anything, and I was growing tired of it.   More and more, I desired to make real connections.   But I hadn't seen until then that specialness and connectedness are in tension, that to emphasize one is necessarily to de-emphasize the other, and that in any moment we have the opportunity to make the choice between them.

The book goes on to say:

Unity ... comes from letting go of the need to compare oneself to others, and choosing instead to connect through a sense of equality.

I understand that, and the implied tradeoffs, much better now.

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 I like that it is phrased as a question, because it isn't as if connectedness is always to be prized over specialness; and there's a bit of a circularity to it, because one of the things that makes each person particular  -- unique -- "special" -- is the particular combination of connections he has made.  

One example: it's precisely because of my connections with my family members that I am irreplaceable to each of them.  I am a particular person -- "Mom" -- to each of my children, the only mom they have, and my husband's only wife.  Connection and "specialness" are bound up.

Another example:  It's because of their unique connections with different "networks" that certain highly connected people hold together entire communities.   Malcolm Gladwell writes about this topic in his book The Tipping Point.  Are you familiar with the saying "six degrees of separation?"  The idea that every person is connected to every other person on the globe by a chain of introduction ("I know someone who knows someone who knows someone...") that's on average only six people long?  Many researchers, most famously Stephen Milgram, have attempted to measure interconnectedness through correspondence experiments.  But it isn't just the length of the "chain," but the structure of connectedness of the whole, that is interesting.  Gladwell writes:

The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts....Most of us don't have particularly broad and diverse groups of friends... In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.

Social connections aren't spread out evenly.  They cluster:  most of us have many connections within small groups that share lots of connections.  But here and there are individuals who tie those clusters together -- people who have connections to many different clusters.   By necessity, having many diverse connections mean that most of the connections aren't particularly strong.  (Gladwell says that such "connectors" have "mastered what sociologists call the 'weak tie,' a friendly yet casual social connection.  On Gladwell's web page is reprinted a brief excerpt,"The Connectors," that introduces the concept.)  But even the most highly connected people probably have a few very strong, prized connections with a few select and dear friends.  At least, that seems to be true about the connectors I know.

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Connectors wouldn't be connectors, wouldn't tie so many people together, if they weren't willing to be "special" in the sense that in each cluster they're the one person who stands out because, well, they know so many people outside the cluster.  So their numerous weak ties aren't to be disparaged:  they are extremely valuable.

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When I stepped back from most work other than directly meeting my family's needs, it was kind of like saying to the world:  I'm going to focus my energy on building a few connections, and reinforcing them heavily, rather than on making numerous connections that, because numerous, can't be strong.  

And that's what I do.  I have the chance to carefully supervise the connections between each child and his siblings, between these children and a few close friends, between the children and my friends and my friends' children, between my friends' children and me.  I have time to cultivate a few friendships of my own, too.   The networks my kids and I move in are small but connection-dense.   

 I do it this way not because I think it's better to have fewer, stronger connections than to be "well-connected" -- although I am learning to prefer it -- but because I think it's the kind of connectivity I'm better suited to help build.  I'm not worried that they won't be able to branch out more later.  They have time to develop a connectivity that is their own, once out of my shadow; I'm doing it for myself now, after all, at age thirty-seven, so why not they?

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But on second thought, I am a sort of connector, too.  I work to build the connections for my family in our small cluster, but the nature of being a parent is that you are a bridge to connect your family to the outside world:  a gatekeeper, if you will.  It's a small connection, but to those young people, it is an artery.

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There's another, virtual way of being a connector, and homeschooling is really the perfect outlet for it.  Ever dealing better with ideas than with people, I like moving in multiple mental worlds, and enjoying the surprising connections between them.   I like having a deep knowledge of engineering and also of homemaking.  I like being a scientist (well, sort of) and a theist.  I like being ridiculously unclassifiable on any political spectrum, which, I think, comes with the territory of examined Catholicism.  I like the challenge of standing in the middle between two groups that are foreign to each other -- not because I refuse to commit to membership in or agreement with either group, but because I like to thoroughly understand the perspectives of both -- and attempting to translate.  This is the kind of connection I like to make, and I think I am not bad at it, when I get the chance.  (At least in writing.  Never at parties.)

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I think maybe the level of connection one creates is part of  one's vocation, and so unique; after all, connections create responsibilities, and fulfilling these is what vocation is all about.   Perhaps those "connectors" among us, tying the clusters together with a mass of weak links, have a greater impact than the rest -- at least when they work to keep the links active.  A greater responsibility, even?  Maybe. 

Here's a little story about the value of being multiply connected, and a lesson that no matter what kind of connectivity we enjoy, we always have the choice to reinforce those connections -- to send a little jolt of energy across a gap, so to speak -- and that when we do send that jolt along, it can travel quite far. 

A couple of days ago I wrote about calling Poison Control from camp when my child got tree sap in her eye.  I was happy because they exist and because they give good advice; in a different universe where PCC did not exist or was run by lawyers, my vacation would have been ruined.   I believe I wrote something along the lines of "YAY POISON CONTROL.  I wish I could send you cupcakes."

Now, I may not be a connector in this particular field, but:

1. commenter/reader/three-dimensional contact ChristyP is, and she forwarded my blog post to 
2. a colleague who directs a poison control center in her state.   The colleague forwarded the email to
3.  the managing director of my local poison control center, with whom she was apparently on a first-name basis.    The managing director shared the story with 
4. the VP of professional and support services of the medical center that hosts the poison control center.  And that vice president surprised
5. "Dustin," the poison information provider who took my call, with 
6. a tray of cupcakes.

Count 'em, folks!    Too bad I didn't ask for Champagne!

But what's really great about this is the reminder that, no matter how numerous or even how weak the connections we control may be, no matter whether they are between our own family members or across town, we often get a chance to pass a little something along.  It may come to nothing, or it may "merely" make someone's day more interesting, or  -- who knows?  It could pay back far in the future.  I think I will think of this story often when those little chances make themselves known.

Commenter ChristyP makes an appearance on the blog.

Sometimes I wish we lived in the sort of town that would make our friends say, "Aren't we lucky we know somebody there? Let's go visit!" instead of "Yeesh, why would you want to live in a place where, five months out of the year, you have to breathe through your mouth so your nose hairs don't freeze?"

Fortunately, on occasion an academic conference or some other annual meeting will occur in Minneapolis, and then people remember we live there, and together those two things make it worth coming, at least when the conference is in June and not January.

A sense of distance.

Ford was very kind -- he gave the barman another five-pound note and told him to keep the change.  The barman looked at it and then looked at Ford.  He suddenly shivered:  he experienced a momentary sensation that he didn't understand because no one on Earth had ever experienced it before.  In moments of great stress, every life form tht exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal.  This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth.  On Earth it is never possible to be farther than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn't very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed.  Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born six hundred light-years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse. 

The barman reeled for a moment, hit by a shocking, incomprehensible sense of distance.  He didn't know what it meant, but he looked at Ford Prefect with a new sense of respect, almost awe.

------- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

My husband travels frequently for business, I think I've mentioned.  I often say that the frequency is just about right; he is generally gone three or four days per month.  Certainly we would like to see more of him, and so I'm glad they aren't more often; on the other hand, since he travels so regularly, the children and I are quite used to it.  "Daddy's-out-of-town" has its own peculiar routine.

On those days, I (instead of Mark) herd everyone into the car and get them to swimming lessons on time; I (instead of Mark) drop the bigger boys off at Wednesday night catechism class and take the younger two to buy groceries before coming back to pick them up; I (instead of Mark) sweep the kitchen and wipe down the counters when the children have gone to bed; I (instead of Mark) make the morning coffee.   Because I do those things, I lose some of my planning time, some of my blogging time; but I've been doing it so long that it is just another kind of normal.  If there is a trip scheduled for the second week of the month, I have to do double school planning on the first week of the month, or else operate a bit more on the fly.  

Other stuff that Mark usually does, I simply don't do.  It's Mark who goes in with the children at bedtime and sits with them, together saying their evening prayer; when he leaves, he reminds them to say their prayers in the evening, and we leave it to them.   Maybe I'm lazy?  Maybe I'm too busy cleaning the kitchen? In any case, bedtime prayers is Mark's "turf," and I don't have any desire to try to substitute for him, at least when he will be back in just a few days.

This kind of normal is not entirely routine, not entirely the same as usual.  If Mark is gone for more than three nights, we will probably have a pizza-and-movie evening, and sometimes we accept an invitation to stay for dinner at a friend's house.  I make dinners the children all like, because the children's appreciation is all I will get:  chili, chicken soup, tacos, spaghetti and meatballs, Caesar salad (yeah, for some reason they all love it, and so do I, so it works out).  

I admit to sometimes serving the kids their dinner and then sending them up to watch movies while I eat in front of the computer screen or engrossed in a book.  After I have been surrounded by people for enough hours, I am desperate for quiet and solitude.  I usually work some such time into the middle of my school day anyway (we call it "break time" and it happens right after lunch), and when Mark is gone I crave it in the evening too.  I don't always indulge myself that way, but I do sometimes.

The last time Mark was gone on a weekend, which is much rarer, I hired a babysitter for a few hours between lunch and dinner on Sunday, just so I could disappear and decompress.  That money was well spent.  

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The quote at the beginning, though -- the sense of distance?  

When I say the travel is routine, I really mean it.  We know by heart the schedules of the planes that trundle back and forth between Minneapolis and the two or three Midwestern cities he travels to most.  (He says he barely notices takeoffs and landings anymore, and the one time we went with him, rolling it into a family trip, I was startled to hear multiple hotel workers calling him by name).  

But this week he's in Italy!

It's a slightly longer trip than usual, but that's not the only reason it feels sort of strange.  There is something surreal about waking up in the morning, knowing that overnight one's husband has been whisked 4700 miles away.   I can't quite believe it in my bones; perhaps it is just not part of my evolutionary heritage to really believe that the flesh of my flesh can have been separated, teased apart, and taken so far off in such a short time.  Perhaps if he had been plodding off to New York on horseback, and there haggled prices for a berth in a merchant's sailing ship, I'd get used to the idea in the time it would have taken to happen.

We talk a couple of times a day, and the voice-Skype connection is only slightly garbled compared to a cell phone connection to Ohio or Tennessee or Indiana, and I'm still talking on my same old phone.  Nevertheless there are hours of difference between my clock and his, and there's something uniquely disconnecting about the calls -- I just woke up and you're already done with lunch?  It's midafternoon and you can't talk long because you're exhausted and it's dark and you had a lot of good wine at dinner and you want to go to bed?  

And then there's a third disconnect, along the lines of "you had the local Raboso and the veal cheeks for dinner, and we had nachos." I cannot deny there's some power that one.

But the aspect that sends me reeling the most really is the simple distance:  it's not heartbreaking, nor sad, nor frightening, just simply strange and foreign that this person who is part of me can possibly have gotten so far away, even for a few days.     I feel I ought to be there (and not just for the veal cheeks).  One of these days it may work out that I can come along, and perhaps that may make a difference.

Perhaps the "few days" is the part that is so strange, that a distance so wide can be folded up so small that it almost -- almost -- fits into the spaces of our usual routines.

 

Quiet reconstructions.

(This post was updated  at 5:10 pm to add links to the artwork mentioned)

 

Mark is off on his annual ski trip, leaving the children and me home for a rare weekend without him. We are quite used to being on our own on weekdays and weekday nights, because his job takes him out of town frequently, but weekend trips are unusual. We shook it up a little: I took the kids to Saturday evening Mass, so that there would not be a morning rush, and (here is a first for me) hired a babysitter for Sunday afternoon so I could slip out and get a little breathing space.

With no one to tell me to turn off the light, and no place to go early in the morning, I stayed up late Saturday reading. Long after the two-year-old had nursed to sleep, his jaws going slack and releasing me, I glanced at the clock and put my book aside, and then slid carefully out of bed, thirsty. The light from the bedroom cast my shadow on the stairwell wall as I descended to the kitchen in my pajamas and bare feet.

I had left a dim light on -- I always do when Mark is gone -- so I could see for the trip to the faucet with my glass. After I drank a long draught and set the empty glass on the counter, I paused to look around me. I had swept the kitchen thoroughly and wiped the counters before herding the children up to bed, and though the floor was probably not very clean, in the dim light no smudges were visible and the dark wood gleamed softly. The books were put away and the area rug was swept. The dishwasher hummed and swished. My rocking chair by the bookshelf looked suddenly inviting, and instead of climbing back up the stairs I went over and sat down, drawing my legs up under myself in the perch to which I, whose feet rarely extend to the floor from an easy chair, am accustomed.

Everyone else was asleep or absent. I looked around me and felt a sudden welling-up of pleasure in the ownership of my home. It is funny, of course I own this home with Mark -- we literally "made" this home together, designed it for our family. I rarely think of the "mine-ness" of it. Being home in it is so ordinary, and it is usually the source of so many things I must get and do and fix and clean and prepare -- I do not often stop and center myself in it. And yet, here it is, always all around me, sheltering us all together.

I kind of like it empty and clean-looking. I don't get to see it that way very often. That pleasure would not be so potent if I did not get to enjoy it noisy, full, and messy almost every day, I suppose.

I am not home now. I am at a local modern art museum (the Walker, for those who know Minneapolis). The kids are home with the babysitter. I will have to get up and go back in just a few minutes.

One of the exhibits that is here right now is called "Lifelike." It is a collection of pieces that look like ordinary objects, or really are ordinary objects. Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes are there, and Chuck Close's "Big Self-Portrait", as well as some photorealist paintings, and a charming painted wooden sculpture called "Weeds" of lifelike little plants that appear to be growing from the crack between wall and floor. There was a short film which at first glance appeared to be images of New York City street scenes, dumpsters and signage and the like, but on closer examination had been shot on a working sound stage that is used for city street scenes in movies. Things like that: either the truly ordinary brought into close focus, or illusions of ordinariness. One of the installations that attracted me most was "Bremen Towne," a room that had been carefully assembled to be an exact replica of the kitchen of the artist's midcentury childhood home. That artist, Keith Edmier, had obtained the correct model of refrigerator, vintage cabinetry, and so on. Where he could not obtain the right type of item, he had manufactured them: the linoleum tiles had been laser-etched using a single original tile as a pattern, and the dinette set had been sculpted.

I could not help but feel a certain link between the gleaming vintage kitchen and dinette, nostalgia for the past executed in Formica and harvest-gold Amana finish, and my feeling of nostalgia-for-the-present-moment of being in my own quiet kitchen late at night. The artist had created a clean, perfect kitchen after his own memories, and it was pleasant to stand in the cheery, midcentury (so retro!) space. His memories, though, must contain more noise and mess than this, just as my life usually does. At the same time, there is something real and really peaceful, not artificial, about the quiet of my late-night kitchen. The children are real, and really sleeping upstairs. Maybe it is just a little message to myself that I need to take the time to enjoy the space I live in on my own terms, a little more often than I do.