Langer Loksh

Hyannis *Hearts* Jeff

On Friday night the Cape Cod Baseball League's Hyannis Mets celebrated the new lights Jeff built for their field. The four of us drove down for the occasion. We had a champagne toast as the lights flickered on. About 60 people applauded and then headed for a cocktail reception at the Wianno Grille.

The Hyannis Mets had apparently very little money to fund their field lighting. They'd bought some lights a few years ago, but they were leaning up against the old high school, rusting, because the one estimate they got for installation was for, say, nine zillion dollars.

They called local mover and shaker Sam Traywick, who networked his way to Jeff and to an electrian who specializes in baseball field lights. Jeff offered his drilling services for less than ten percent of  the nine zillion quote, and Sam got a local concrete company to cut a great deal. The electrician also gave them a discount. Here are Jeff, Sam, and John Bowman the electrician.

Peter, the vice president of the Hyannis Mets, talked about how much he appreciated Jeff's work, in particular how patient Jeff had been and how much time he had taken to explain what he was doing to everyone who came to watch him drill. Then Tino, the team's president, presented Jeff with a Barnstable Bat Company bat inscribed "Let There Be Lights!"

If you are someone in whom I confide offline, you can imagine how much that meant to us, and how gratifying it was to see Jeff honored for his manner as well as his skill, particularly in front of our kids.

Throughout the evening, women approached me to shake my hand and thank me for Jeff's work. "You have no idea how important this is for us," they all said. I've never given it much thought, but I guess I figured the Cape Cod League was well funded. The women explained to me that each town has to come up with the money for its own team and park. Local families host the players and the trainers all summer in their homes. And though most people probably associate Hyannis with the Kennedy compound, in reality, Hyannis is about as gritty as the Cape gets. "Cotuit has wealthy benefactors," said Tino's wife Terri. "Hyannis is like the city--we have homeless people, we have all the services." She told me about all the great programs the town has for kids in the summer time--all of which cost money. For them, being able to get the field lights installed at a price they could afford was like a dream come true.  "Any time you want to stay on the Cape, you just call," Terri said over and over--and three or four other women made me the same generous offer.

Come baseball season, we'll be rooting for a new team--the Hyannis Mets. Cheers!

White Truffle Oil: Not My Thing

National Treasure is like, my favorite movie ever*, and my whole family just came with me to see National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, and already I'm like, "What's on page 47 of the Book of Secrets? When is National Treasure 3 coming out?" And Jeff is all, <eyeball roll>.

And when I told my friend Andy that I was thinking of bringing a chocolate pudding pie to New Year's Eve at his house, he was like, "Oh that's OK, we always have plenty of food."

So I told Jeff, "I guess Andy doesn't like chocolate pudding pie," and Jeff informed me that no grown up besides me likes Jell-o, pudding, or Cool-Whip.

Can this be true?

*Except for L.A. Confidential, When Harry Met Sally, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Bridget Jones' Diary, The Godfather, The Empire Strikes Back, Dr.  Zhivago, Gone With the Wind, Chinatown, and the complete John Cusack oeuvre.

More For Me Than For You

Sometimes I don't blog because I don't have anything interesting to say, but really, I need to keep track of things for myself. So this is for me, so I'll remember.

I took the kids to a solstice program at Drumlin Farm. When we walked in, the lights were dim, a fire crackled in the fireplace, and two women sat playing old carols on the harp and the recorder. They stopped, and told us a few folktales about this dark time of year--what happened to the sun? Why do the evergreens keep their leaves?

We tied together little bundles of greenery for our doors, and made candles by filling cupcake papers with greenery and hot wax. We placed all our worries on little bits of greenery and laid them on a yule log and watched them crackle up in the fire.

Then we crunched our way on the snowy road all the way down to the barns. We saw all the animals  in their night time stalls. Charlie was worried. "Animals bite my jacket," he said. I promised no harm would come to his Spiderman parka. Summer made a friend; the two little girls hopped from stall to stall. "This is Midnight!" Summer called, remembering a pony.

I carried Charlie piggyback up the hill. All the way home in the car, thanks to the cupcake paper candles, he cried for a cupcake. Even so when I think of that night, I think of the stillness of the farm in the quiet snow, and the soft, old music. 

Not Sure Why I Bother

Summer's favorite stocking stuffer: a Happy Meal toy that she lost last year, that reappeared in the bottom of her stocking this year. She, or her brother, apparently tucked it in there before we packed away the Christmas stuff.

Something Right

I've been meaning to write about this for a couple of weeks and now is the first time I've had alone, without eight thousand other things to do. It's almost midnight on Christmas Eve, and my husband, my children, their cats, my brother, and his dog, are all asleep upstairs. (Actually Becky the cat just walked by me, but you get the idea.)  I've only hidden two stocking stuffers so well that I can't find them--the Down East Best of Maine issue and a Red Sox magnet for Jeff's truck. I still have two or three things to wrap, and a few screws to tighten in the fire truck bed that we snagged, used, on Craig's List, for a third the price of a new one. Because if you're going to give your kid an enormous chunk of plastic for Christmas, it should probably be a chunk of plastic that's already out there in the universe, and not one generated just for you, don't you think?   

What I wanted to write about was Charlie's parent/teacher conference. Charlie's teacher S. told me all the stuff she has to tell me--about how he's doing all the things he's supposed to be doing in terms of fine motor, gross motor, communication, socialization, etc. But she also told me that he is the only child in the class who coughs into his elbow. She told me about how excited he was when he and I made pumpkin bread to share with the class. And then she told me that he asks about me, and Jeff, and Summer, but not in a panicky way. He just wants to kind of check in on our whereabouts: "Mama? Daddy?" he asks, and S. says, "They are at work." Charlie says, "Summo?" And S. says "She's at school." And Charlie says "Oh!" and goes on fixing things with his plastic tools.

S. tells me that Charlie has a healthy bond with us. He's attached, but in a good way. We are, in other words, doing a good job. "He loves his life with you," S. says.

During these last few rather unpleasant weeks, I've held on to that like Summer clutching her Mr. Cuddle Wuddle. "He loves his life with you." Even though I'm having an average of two panic attacks a week; and my office looks like Michael's craft store and Ritz Camera collided in mid-air above my desk; and the cats are tearing the fabric off the stereo speakers and scratching the Big Papi sectional; and other things that I can't blog about are still totally not cool; we are somehow still doing OK.

S. probably knew, because she is a parent herself, that she has given me the best gift I could ever have. "He loves his life with you."

Really, what else is there?

P.S. Meredith sorry about all the post-publishing edits and Merry Christmas and thank you for listening.

Ladies Night

Yum.

Merry Christmas, ladies.

The Coolest Thing I Ordered for Christmas

The question is, whose stocking will it stuff? The person who was actually alive when Star Wars came out, the person who watches it over and over, or the person who is currently fixated on "bad guys"?

Lifting, a Little

This afternoon I took a deep belly breath and called the vet. The woman I spoke with told me that the culture they sent to the lab would take three weeks; the vet was mistaken when he said we'd know something this week.

Did I:

A. Buckle at the knees at the prospect of being dizzy and short of breath for two and a half more weeks;

or

B. Suddenly feel a weight lift, just like when I found out about the miscarriage. I don't have to think about this for two and half more weeks! There's nothing I can do! I get to celebrate Christmas and go to Andy and Michelle's for New Year's Eve and eat cheese fondue for breakfast and just forget about it!

If you guessed B, you're right!

It makes no sense. Why didn't I think this way all week--like, "There's nothing I can do about it until Friday, so I'm going to enjoy every second of the winter wonderland around me!" instead of like, "This is going to suck so bad I can't take it I know I can't take it I just can't take it please somebody make this all go away."

I guess it's because I am totally screwed up. But that's OK. For whatever reason, I'm letting myself forget about it this time, and by the time the lab results are back, maybe some of the crazy will go away and maybe  I'll be in a better position to take on whatever I've got to do.

As always, thanks for sticking with me when I go into train wreck mode. I'm glad you're still here.

While I'm on the topic of crippling panic, Dooce had something to say about mental anguish this week. 

Say it Ain't So, Lenny

And squeaky clean Andy Pettitte?

Going on Six

I usually just ignore Summer when she tells me she has a loose tooth. It's just part of her yearning to be like the kids in her class who are "popping up six," as she says. She can't wait to be six and can't wait to lose a tooth. But today I actually felt her tooth and it wiggled. Her tiny beautiful baby teeth! Are going to fall out soon!